17 ms·

Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why

261 points by 01-_- 1y ago

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
Essentially big tech is under the jurisdiction of the mad king, which means all users of big tech are also under that same jurisdiction, including any and all private and public organisations in any country. This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world. Much like the diving head first first into AI uptake, the whole cloud mania thing coming home to roost. If calling a war criminal a war criminal results in sanctions, could sanctions be the new tariffs? I don't want to give him ideas... This should scare pretty much any organisation outside of the US.
- spwa4 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - holowoodman 1y ago
    Nero's music seems to have been as bad as Trump's golf skills. But you never ever tell the mad king that he isn't as apt as he thinks, you just let him win, for your own sake...
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago
    > credibly accused of being in the Epstein files Is there a source of this other than Elon? Cause he’s anything but credible
    - spwa4 1y ago
      Aside from everything that existed before? Not really, no. But here's a summary of the facts so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuaCuiQmPBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuaCuiQmPBU
    - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
      Trump's own admission to knowing Epstein, photos of them together, Trump admiring Epstein saying he was a "terrific guy" and "It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
    - riffraff 1y ago
      The fact that Trump and Epstein were friends has always been known, it was always obvious that he would be in the files concerning him. Musk's accusation is relevant because it's a maga personality saying it, and blind supporters see it now, but it was always known.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >Given that he effectively and literally ignited Los Angeles Are we talking about the same LA? Because I only saw LA residents burning down their city. I didn't see Trump or federal law enforcement in LA burning down cars and looting stores. So how do you get to blaming Trump for LA resident trashing their own city?
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Because the obvious intention of sending in Marines was, and is, to further escalate the situation. I, and I suspect no reasonable person, would ever entertain any other interpretation
      - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        [flagged]
        const_cast 1y ago
        > "Orange Man Bad" Trump Derangement syndrome See, this is why nobody takes you seriously.
        FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        So what? They don't even take themselves seriously. The main thing you'll observe is nobody provided any arguments that I was wrong. Because I wasn't.
        const_cast 1y ago
        Well nobody proved you wrong because right off the bat your premise was incorrect - I never said that anything justifies rioting. I'm merely pointing out the obvious here. We all want less property damage, both you and me. If we want to do that, then we shouldn't be sending in the Marines. That's not going to help anything, it's explicitly just going to make it worse. Trump isn't stupid, he knows that, which is why he did it. This is media bait, and it's incredibly irresponsible to use actual lives as pawns in some game of owning the libs. This doesn't even touch on the fact that this is all being done at the behest of California leadership. If Governor Newsom thinks that this is unnecessary and the LAPD can handle it, that's something our federal government should respect. And, I suspect Newsom is more than correct - the LAPD is a very large police force. The Marines here are being sent in the stoke the flame, not put it out.
- close04 1y ago
  > This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world. He has even bigger levers to pull unfortunately. Sanctions are this giant hammer that can be dropped on anyone and the weight of the US ensures compliance. When the ICC chief prosecutor was sanctioned it wasn't just US companies who gave in, like Microsoft. His UK bank also blocked him. Sooner or later in the chain of dependencies there will be something based in the US or relying on something based in the US. Your MSP, the airline you travel with, anything will be used against you if sanctions are transmitted like a disease to anyone giving you assistance. No company or country wants to risk being buried to fight the US on this.
  - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    > His UK bank also blocked him This is a 'funny' situation, and potentially telling as to who holds more power, given that the UK government has recently sanctioned two Israeli ministers: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-britain-settlements-sanctions-e9ab86f5561af8afbdbf34709efe504e https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-britain-settl... Are UK Banks (maybe only this UK Bank) more beholden to the US than the UK? Is / Would this UK Bank also block(ing) those two Israeli ministers?
- Gravityloss 1y ago
  One theory about developing countries was that if oil is found, it's naturally easier for a dictator to control, since it's a concentrated source of revenue. Just a small amount of mercenaries is enough. So there will be a series of dictators. If there's no concentrated source of revenue, the people need to be involved and thus a more democratic path is likely. With the internet and software, especially with platforms, you see this concentration of power effect. That then easily leads to certain kind of power dynamics. Ie just as a hypothetical example, if there's only a few closed conversation platforms, government can control them relatively easily.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
    And yet, we haven't found a good solution to that yet, and everybody uses smartphones controlled by Apple and Google, communicate via channels controlled by Meta and so on.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      It's ok, European Union will enact another regulation saying that starting tomorrow we'll all be more innovative than the US.
  - raxxorraxor 1y ago
    Europe needs a whole new engineering culture if it wants to stay relevant in this field. It still is focused on outsourcing problems, people are too lazy for details and demand ready to use products. I believe engineering in growing countries have completely different mindsets. They put the enterprise in enterprise and the results speak for themselves. Of course you have to stay pragmatic here and not every battle is in the interest of a company. But engineers with the ability to pursue their craft, sensible knowledge management and training have become a rare sight. So R&D is just plainly better in other countries. Problem is that this laziness of course empowers other players to grow to insane dimensions, like Microsoft did. Microsoft has many competent developers, but their success isn't due to software quality. Especially if you look at the latest cloud offerings. They are so large that they don't have to be good anymore.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > Essentially big tech is under the jurisdiction of the mad king, and of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the SEC etc.
wickedsight 1y ago
We are in such an insane bind here... We can see China and the US developing AI tooling (and other tech) at a high speed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of regulation and even active deregulation. In the EU, we won't be able to keep up with this speed because we tend to want to regulate first and many of our regulations hinder gathering the insane amounts of data needed. Falling behind on AI and not wanting to be dependent on tools from outside the EU will put us at a significant disadvantage in research and production of new technologies and we're already far behind in that aspect. We also don't want to drop our values just to keep up. Which is partially because we're still in the luxury position of being very rich. I wonder, though, whether we can keep this going in the current state of the world. Things seem to have changed massively in our disadvantage over the past 5 or so years.
- holowoodman 1y ago
  > We can see China and the US developing AI tooling (and other tech) at a high speed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of regulation and even active deregulation. In the EU, we won't be able to keep up with this speed because we tend to want to regulate first and many of our regulations hinder gathering the insane amounts of data needed. Oh, but the EU didn't just "tend to want to". They already did regulate AI in the most onerous possible way for AI users and producers. They even pride themselves on regulating before everyone else and before even knowing what they are regulating: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO...
- pjc50 1y ago
  It's not yet clear whether AI is so effective at actual work that it justifies throwing away privacy and even copyright law. But there do seem to still be open models if you think you need one.
  - TheChaplain 1y ago
    I don't think he meant going to such absolute extremes... Regulation is good, it keeps actors in line and prevent cheating, but then overregulation comes into the picture and shoots them in the foot while expecting them to compete on the world stage. Think balance.
tormeh 1y ago
Wake me up when governments actually start writing checks. I bet the ICC will stay on Microsoft because doing anything else would be difficult. All anyone in big org IT knows is Microsoft, and no one wants to change.
- holowoodman 1y ago
  Oh, they are writing checks. They have been writing big checks to create GAIA-X and a few other things as the European alternative sovereign cloud. But basically no-one is using it because "but my Outlook doesn't work!". So it is all wasted money because of stupid bureaucrats and politicians as users who cannot be arsed to remember that their email isn't in Outlook anymore... You might say it is a little more complicated, but actually it isn't. Nobody wants any kind of change, so things stay as they are. Only the Americans can change things and change your Windows/Outlook/Azure, because then "it is like it is, we have to update"...
  - raverbashing 1y ago
    Did Gaia-X ship anything besides web pages with fluff and more 'policy documents'? One line of functioning code?
    - holowoodman 1y ago
      Yes, there was something: https://gaia-x-hub.de/en/funding-projects/ https://gaia-x-hub.de/en/funding-projects/ But as always, most of it is pork for some cronies anyways. One related thing that has been developed/packaged is the "sovereign cloud stack" https://scs.community/ https://scs.community/ . However, it didn't see much use yet, for the reasons mentioned.
    - nosianu 1y ago
      In the last discussion about this that I read here and participated in, as someone who got paid from that fund for a while, I think the consensus was that the project was less meant to deliver something tangible, and more of a camouflaged general subsidy for participating European software firms.
mytailorisrich 1y ago
The ICC has nothing to do with Europe and the EU apart from being located in the Netherlands, unless there is a claim that it is not independent and partial (hum hum). The claim that it is "central to Europe’s commitment to human rights" to fluff their case is FUD basically to promote their products.
- holowoodman 1y ago
  The country where an international organisation is physically located tends to provide certain kinds of infrastructure and support besides the real estate.
- thrance 1y ago
  There you go, you answered your own question: the ICC is located in Europe. No need for pointless warcrimes denialism (hum hum).
- pjc50 1y ago
  The ICC is the legacy of the Nuremberg prosecutions.
- AnAfrican 1y ago
  It doesn't matter. It's an issue of "this could happen to us".
nanna 1y ago
European digital sovereignty in email depends on having a decent FOSS email client, but the best we have is Thunderbird. I hope TB can make up for all those years of lost time and catch up with Outlook. From their emails it seems like the focus is to compete with Exchange and to build smartphone clients. Personally I just really hope they find time to deal with the absolutely shoddy search.
- sabellito 1y ago
  I never used an email client in my life, I don't personally know anyone who does it either. I wonder what's the distribution between people who use clients vs just web.
  - guappa 1y ago
    You also need a good open source web client then…
  - lynx97 1y ago
    I never used a web based email client in my life, I don't personally know many people who still do so either.
- hyperman1 1y ago
  Not saying that Thunderbird is great, but ms Outlook has serious problems finding mails even for very specific keywords if it is older than a few months. They seem to hyper index recent mails and forget all else. Ironically, I have set up thunderbird as a client for my exchange email just for archival, and it does much better finding them.
- raverbashing 1y ago
  Honestly why? Why does "digital sovereignty" have to rely on stuff like "FOSS email client" Honestly, as much of FOSS has its importance, focusing exclusively on open source solutions is probably part of why things don't go ahead Honestly Thunderbird was good 20 years ago. And even then... Makeshift solutions with pieces duck-taped together and inconsistent UX are not going to win any friends
arresin 1y ago
Why are the good guys sanctioning ICC judges?
- spwa4 1y ago
  The relationship between the US and the ICC has been deteriorating for 3-4 decades now. The OIC effectively controls the ICC (they have the majority vote in electing judges), and the US fights terrorism. This used to be a huge complaint across African countries (because they had the same problem: African governments went pretty far in suppressing islamic insurgencies that threatened their existence. Of course the insurgencies committed 100x the human rights violations that those states did, but never got convicted)
  - DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
    > The OIC effectively controls the ICC That's a pretty crazy claim. 125 countries have joined the ICC. The OIC only has 57 members (not all of them even have a Muslim majority). Of the three judges who issued the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, two are European (one is French, the other Slovenian). The US has the same problem with the ICC as it does with the ICJ: the US government does not want to be subject to international law. The US is used to acting as a superpower, in whatever way it wants. It just fundamentally does not accept the premise that its actions should be in any way constrained by international law. In this particular instance, the problem the US has with the ICC is that the US is Israel's primary backer. The US provides the money, weapons and diplomatic support that Israel needs to continue its war against the Palestinians and occupation of the Palestinian territories. The US itself is heavily implicated in the crimes that the ICC is prosecuting here.
    - mytailorisrich 1y ago
      Countries are sovereign and what is called "international law" are voluntary agreements among countries.
      - spwa4 1y ago
mg 1y ago
The article is about email. Europe could probably bring email "in-house". Large players like IONOS and OVH might help do it at scale. But what about AI? Soon all of our email will be pre-handled by our OpenAI assistant while we will be driven around by Waymo and a good part of our work is done by a Tesla humanoid robot. How can Europe catch up and do that in a sovereign way? For world-class AI, a country needs: 1 Photolithography 2 Wafers 3 GPUs 4 Software (SOTA Neural Networks) 5 Energy Components 2-5 seem not on the horizon on a world-class level in Europe. So Europe probably won't have the means to do AI "in-house" in the coming decades, right?
- ricardobeat 1y ago
  Photolithography is in the hands of Europe already, and that makes no difference. All that really matters at the moment is the software and where 'the cloud' resides. We already have AI in-house. Mistral is based in France, and their Le Chat platform hosted exclusively in the EU.
  - mg 1y ago
    But does Mistral stand a chance to make a state of the art model? People will always want to use the best model. Like they use the best search engine. How would Mistral catch up with US companies, who spend tens of billions of dollars per year on improving their models? As far as I know, Mistral raised something like $1B so far.
  - norman784 1y ago
    IIRC I read somewhere that ASML depends on some components provided by the US, if so, then it's not 100% in Europe hands yet.
    - guiraldelli 1y ago
      If nothing has changed in a few years, the dependency is only for the EUV machines, and that company was acquired by ASML. So keeping the company in USA is a favour they do to the country, not that they rely on it.
Certhas 1y ago
I agree with the argument, but... > [Would we allow a situation where] a foreign power could force them anytime to cut Europe’s power? We did just that with Russian gas imports. It took a massive effort to transition of these imports after Russia closed the tap.
- StanislavPetrov 1y ago
  It wasn't Russia who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline..
  - holowoodman 1y ago
    But Russia stopped exporting gas through that pipeline using nonsensical excuses a few weeks before it was blown up by the Ukrainians. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream
    - StanislavPetrov 1y ago
      Nonsensical excuses like the people who wanted to buy their gas wouldn't pay them in their own currency? If I'm selling you my car, it is my right to say I only accept US dollars. If you insist on only offering me Mexican pesos, it isn't "nonsensical" when I say no, and refuse to sell you the car unless you pay US dollars. It is amazing how objective reality and basic common sense go out the window when it comes to the Ukraine/Russia situation. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gas-still-flows-russia-europe-buyers-navigate-putins-rouble-order-2022-04-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gas-still-flows-russ...
      - riffraff 1y ago
        The request for payment in rubles came about when contracts were already signed. If you unilaterally decide to change the terms of a contract it's quite obvious that the other party may not agree.
      - Certhas 1y ago
tallanvor 1y ago
The problem is that at some point you're always going to be subject to at least one country's laws, and at some point those laws will conflict with those of another country, even within the EU. Going on-prem is probably the safest, but you're still at risk of physical search and seizure as well as being subject to pressure placed on your ISP to cut you off if someone really wants it done.
- guappa 1y ago
  You speak as if in USA there wasn't a different tax code every 3km
j0057 1y ago
"Would Europe ever hand over control of its national power grids to foreign companies bound by non-European law? Would we trust a foreign supplier’s guarantee for 99.999% uptime (which is the standard uptime SLA agreement of cloud providers) while at the same time a foreign power could force them anytime to cut Europe’s power? Of course not." EU already does this: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plants-in-the-cloud/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-p... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Yes, and not only for electricity and the cloud. Also for 5G networks: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ Bert Hubert is good at identifying problems like this, but his proposed approach is always to demand the EU pass new laws even when the problem is Europeans asking people in foreign jurisdictions to run everything for them because they can do it better, partly due to not being under EU control. The cause of the problem is presented as the solution. The internet has a compressive effect on markets. Most markets can only sustain about 3-5 competitors before the number of choices becomes overwhelming and customers can no longer easily differentiate between them. If you offer your services over the internet, that means 3-5 competitors globally, and in turn that means hacking one of them can give you control over a huge chunk of the market. It also means it's easy to end up with all of those competitors being outside your jurisdiction if you aren't highly competitive.
pembrook 1y ago
Unfortunately the time to think about digital sovereignty was back in the 1970s. We've stacked on so many layers of abstraction to computing and every step of the way Europe missed the boat due to its underlying structural issues for investment and fragmented cultures/markets. It's quite frankly too late. Here's a NYT article from 34 years ago with the exact same story as today: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-in-computers.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Europe missed the PC, the internet, the smartphone, and is currently burying its head in the sand over AI. Dumping a bunch of money into building an inferior domestic version of Microsoft 365 just as it's about to be disrupted by AI-native paradigms would be the amusing cherry on top. It'd be like Apple moving the final cardboard packaging step to US factories and claiming their entire supply chain is 'sovereign.' Sure, China can't affect that last packaging step. But every layer of (far more important) abstraction below it they still have power over.
falcor84 1y ago
I'd appreciate a legal perspective on this - is the problem that Microsoft's EU operations are run by a corporate division rather than a standalone subsidiary? If it were an EU-based subsidiary that controlled the data about EU citizens, it would not be beholden to US executive orders, while still otherwise offering MS the ability to control global corporate strategy from its US HQ, right? EDIT: fixed s/division/subsidiary/ in the second paragraph
- saubeidl 1y ago
  As long as there's any US entity at any point in the chain, I don't think it's reliable. All this talk of divisions is marketing window dressing as far as I can tell. If decisions are made from the US, it will be used as a weapon against our sovereignty.
  - vbezhenar 1y ago
    Linux kernel is developed in the US. Russia felt it hard way, when their developers were cut from submitting patches. One Trump word and Europe developers will follow. That's just an example. US is a locomotive for the whole computing. I want to underline that IT production chain is incredibly long and excluding US from this chain is impossible, simple as that.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      The kernel is open source. Very worst case, we'll maintain our own fork.
  - pembrook 1y ago
    Except the US doesn't really care about Europe that much. Having a government bureaucracy try to rebuild the entire US cloud software ecosystem because of one four year presidential term (which is already dramatically losing popularity in the US) sounds wildly silly to me. Meanwhile turning away from the US means running into the arms of the Chinese for most things. And they are the much bigger threat to the EU economy given their superior manufacturing abilities -- which still today is the base of the EU's prosperity. Once European industrial companies start losing to the Chinese, it's over for Europe's entire way of life and the social benefits systems all collapse. I'm sure they'll try USSR-style blanket protectionism before this happens, but will just lead to falling even further behind.
rado 1y ago
The EU needs to take over Firefox, improve and support it, declaring independence
_vere 1y ago
I wish they weren't sued into providing a backdoor for the German government, I vastly prefer their corporate structure to proton, but I cant really trust to use a "encrypted" service with a government backdoor.
- tuyeron 1y ago
  Proof? There is no backdoor in Tuta, the code is here: https://github.com/tutao/tutanota https://github.com/tutao/tutanota
  - _vere 1y ago
    There was a court case here a while ago because the feds wanted access to someone's emails. They won the case and forced tuta to build them a way into their system that allows them to get at non end to end encrypted emails before they get at-rest-encrypted. German article https://www.heise.de/news/Gericht-zwingt-Mailprovider-Tutanota-zu-Ueberwachungsfunktion-4972460.html https://www.heise.de/news/Gericht-zwingt-Mailprovider-Tutano... English article about the same topic https://hackread.com/encrypted-email-provider-tutanota-backdoor-service/ https://hackread.com/encrypted-email-provider-tutanota-backd... This essentially means they are forced to save a copy of the non encrypted emails somewhere, at least for german customers. You can argue its not a "backdoor" in the typical sense, since end to end encryption is still in place, but like, come on
    - Tutanota 1y ago
      Hi, Tuta Team here, we came across this and wanted to jump in. The facts are correct - thanks for explaining it the way it actually was. We explain in more detail here why this case highlights the need for *end-to-end encryption* and why we recommend everybody using it whenever possible: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ntzn3w/comment/h0vovbb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ntzn3w/comment/h0v...
rswail 1y ago
So there's numerous layers to this: 1. Where and how is the data stored and retrieved? This can be made local by forcing all data users/services to use an EU data storage service that is locally owned and operated and under EU jurisdiction. Access to the data would only be to the service delivery operator and the appropriate EU legal authorities. 2. Where and how is the data accessed? The data needs to be accessed by the service provider (eg an email service) to handle incoming updates and requests. The access could be limited to the required updates and inquiries, or otherwise logged so that the service provider is held accountable for access. 3. Where and how is the service accessible to legal authorities? For example, police warrants for an email inbox. The service provider should be required to identify and reveal publicly what data is available and how it is legally accessible if required. Given encryption, it may be that the service provider is unable to provide that access to anyone except the end user (eg Protonmail, Signal). 4. What control does the end user have over their data and the associated meta-data maintained by the service provider? GDPR covers a lot of ground here, including the right to be forgotten.
- CursedSilicon 1y ago
  Something you missed as well was 2018's "CLOUD Act" [1] Stealing from Wikipedia since frankly it's better articulated than I could do "The CLOUD Act was introduced following difficulties that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had with obtaining remote data through service providers through SCA warrants, as the SCA was written before cloud computing was a viable technology. The situation was highlighted from a 2013 drug trafficking investigation, during which the FBI issued an SCA warrant for emails that a U.S. citizen had stored on one of Microsoft's remote servers in Ireland, which Microsoft refused to provide." US Companies can't simply say "well that's in Europe. That's outside *our control*". The US truly considers its data reach to be global in nature when it comes to US companies. it's absolutely terrifying to think about [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
  - rswail 1y ago
    That's why I'm suggesting that the data storage/retrieval supplier is EU owned and controlled. So in the case you quote, FBI can issue a warrant to Microsoft, but all they can do is pass it on to their data storage provider, who can reject it depending on EU law, not US law.
Havoc 1y ago
Yeah Europe really needs to step up here. It's a huge economic block. The whole chips fab thing may be a bridge too far for now, but the basics really should be doable. The newly launched EU DNS is a good start. Rules like taxpayer money needs to only fund open software etc need to be pushed. The large hosting providers need to be incentivized to build out more complete offerings that don't have gaping product holes vs big cloud etc. Both China and the US are aggressively pushing homegrown & favouring their own players. Time for the EU to do the same
- Quarrel 1y ago
  I agree with the rest, that it is all manageable, but at least: > The whole chips fab thing may be a bridge too far for now for this case, ASML, being Dutch, and crucial to essentially all cutting semiconductor production, gives Europe leverage. That said, a bit like Biden & Trump banning the export of certain tech to China, it is a slippery slope. Past a certain point they're just forced to develop the tech themselves. Hopefully Europe won't be as short-sighted or wilfully-ignorant, and will capitalise on their advantage here- as you are very correct to point out the ultimate vulnerability.
  - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
    You forget one thing: ASML licenses american technology. They can't do anything out of the ordinary unless it has US' blessing. Hence, no leverage. Also, the machines are just one part of the equation. You need chip designs, you need actual foundries where these machines need to be installed and so on.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      If it really came to a falling out like this, why do you think US license rights would be considered at all?
      - klooney 1y ago
        ASML has a significant US research presence too. It's not just a bunch of dudes in Amsterdam.
jansenmac 1y ago
Microsoft did not block the email account of the ICC! This really is misinformation. See here: https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/ https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
- smartmic 1y ago
  I'm not any the wiser from the article - who did what and why doesn't Microsoft want to have done anything?
- nalekberov 1y ago
  I always found Tuta's exaggerated reaction ridiculous. What makes their stand even more questionable when I visit their EU alternatives [1] webpage, first category they list is 'Email', under this category only "eligible" alternative is Tuta Mail. Now, out of all alternative EU email providers they list only themselves as an alternative and expect alternative seekers to trust them? 1. https://tuta.com/blog/boycott-us-choose-european-products https://tuta.com/blog/boycott-us-choose-european-products
  - antonyh 1y ago
    I noticed this too. It makes all their articles look like self-promotion.
- AnAfrican 1y ago
  Not the whole ICC but the sanctioned prosecutor has been disconnected ! >A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
- jorams 1y ago
  That article, and its many versions in other outlets, is a weird (successful) attempt at changing the narrative. The news that triggered all of it was that Microsoft cut off the ICC chief prosecutor's access to his email. Microsoft comes out saying "we did not cut services to the ICC, just its chief prosecutor". The media widely announces "Microsoft did not cut services to the ICC". That's not news, that's just marketing for Microsoft. The original news, and the claims by Tuta, are still correct: Microsoft cut off the ICC chief prosecutor's access to his email due to US sanctions.
KronisLV 1y ago
It seems like people agree that EU alternatives are nice and that open source software is great... but even in software development the people making the choices still opt for databases like Oracle or SQL Server and the large US-centric cloud providers, or even communication apps like Teams/Slack instead of just self-hosting Mattermost/Zulip/whatever. I don't think anyone is taking this seriously enough.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  No one listens to the technical people that espouse the alternatives, partially due to the mainly-impenetrable language difference: business vs technical. Management would rather depend on "Microsoft" than "that employee that talks a lot without saying anything useful / understandable". That's a huge bridge to cross. Even under the mad king, I think most Management would prefer to remain dependent on Microsoft and go out of their way to avoid the ire of the The Kingdom of Trumpistan than to migrate their "everything computer" to a lesser known, lesser proven entity.
  - pas 1y ago
    it's not a technical question simply. this is a business/operations risk management question. compliance, legal liability, BCP, regulatory environment flux, and so on. the case of the ICC obviously shows how little they cared about these things. MS closed the account? where are the offsite/independent backups? etc.
- pas 1y ago
  some do some don't. obviously most IT/software/tech businesses - especially weighted by capital, impact, influence, pedigree, and other factors of visibility and sales pushiness - are US based, so there's no point in caring too much about picking non-US vendors. and many European businesses are targeting the US market, so again not much they can do to escape the influence of Uncle Trump.
MaxPock 1y ago
Nothing has destroyed American goodwill than imposition of extra-territorial sanctions. Btw when the US imposed sanctions on Hong Kong leader ,she had to collect her salary in cash as no bank would process it.
waltercool 1y ago
[dead]
pabs3 1y ago
Digital sovereignty is not someone else's services using someone else's software on someone else's machines on someone else's networks. Its services you run, using software you control, on machines you bought, connected to networks you manage. So reject the cloud and self-host!
computerthings 1y ago
[dead]

261 points by 01-_- 1y ago

Essentially big tech is under the jurisdiction of the mad king, which means all users of big tech are also under that same jurisdiction, including any and all private and public organisations in any country. This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world. Much like the diving head first first into AI uptake, the whole cloud mania thing coming home to roost. If calling a war criminal a war criminal results in sanctions, could sanctions be the new tariffs? I don't want to give him ideas... This should scare pretty much any organisation outside of the US.

spwa4 1y ago
[flagged]
- holowoodman 1y ago
  Nero's music seems to have been as bad as Trump's golf skills. But you never ever tell the mad king that he isn't as apt as he thinks, you just let him win, for your own sake...
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  > credibly accused of being in the Epstein files Is there a source of this other than Elon? Cause he’s anything but credible
  - spwa4 1y ago
    Aside from everything that existed before? Not really, no. But here's a summary of the facts so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuaCuiQmPBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuaCuiQmPBU
  - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
    Trump's own admission to knowing Epstein, photos of them together, Trump admiring Epstein saying he was a "terrific guy" and "It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
  - riffraff 1y ago
    The fact that Trump and Epstein were friends has always been known, it was always obvious that he would be in the files concerning him. Musk's accusation is relevant because it's a maga personality saying it, and blind supporters see it now, but it was always known.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >Given that he effectively and literally ignited Los Angeles Are we talking about the same LA? Because I only saw LA residents burning down their city. I didn't see Trump or federal law enforcement in LA burning down cars and looting stores. So how do you get to blaming Trump for LA resident trashing their own city?
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Because the obvious intention of sending in Marines was, and is, to further escalate the situation. I, and I suspect no reasonable person, would ever entertain any other interpretation
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - const_cast 1y ago
        > "Orange Man Bad" Trump Derangement syndrome See, this is why nobody takes you seriously.
        FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        So what? They don't even take themselves seriously. The main thing you'll observe is nobody provided any arguments that I was wrong. Because I wasn't.
        const_cast 1y ago
        Well nobody proved you wrong because right off the bat your premise was incorrect - I never said that anything justifies rioting. I'm merely pointing out the obvious here. We all want less property damage, both you and me. If we want to do that, then we shouldn't be sending in the Marines. That's not going to help anything, it's explicitly just going to make it worse. Trump isn't stupid, he knows that, which is why he did it. This is media bait, and it's incredibly irresponsible to use actual lives as pawns in some game of owning the libs. This doesn't even touch on the fact that this is all being done at the behest of California leadership. If Governor Newsom thinks that this is unnecessary and the LAPD can handle it, that's something our federal government should respect. And, I suspect Newsom is more than correct - the LAPD is a very large police force. The Marines here are being sent in the stoke the flame, not put it out.
close04 1y ago
> This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world. He has even bigger levers to pull unfortunately. Sanctions are this giant hammer that can be dropped on anyone and the weight of the US ensures compliance. When the ICC chief prosecutor was sanctioned it wasn't just US companies who gave in, like Microsoft. His UK bank also blocked him. Sooner or later in the chain of dependencies there will be something based in the US or relying on something based in the US. Your MSP, the airline you travel with, anything will be used against you if sanctions are transmitted like a disease to anyone giving you assistance. No company or country wants to risk being buried to fight the US on this.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  > His UK bank also blocked him This is a 'funny' situation, and potentially telling as to who holds more power, given that the UK government has recently sanctioned two Israeli ministers: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-britain-settlements-sanctions-e9ab86f5561af8afbdbf34709efe504e https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-britain-settl... Are UK Banks (maybe only this UK Bank) more beholden to the US than the UK? Is / Would this UK Bank also block(ing) those two Israeli ministers?
Gravityloss 1y ago
One theory about developing countries was that if oil is found, it's naturally easier for a dictator to control, since it's a concentrated source of revenue. Just a small amount of mercenaries is enough. So there will be a series of dictators. If there's no concentrated source of revenue, the people need to be involved and thus a more democratic path is likely. With the internet and software, especially with platforms, you see this concentration of power effect. That then easily leads to certain kind of power dynamics. Ie just as a hypothetical example, if there's only a few closed conversation platforms, government can control them relatively easily.
- dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
  And yet, we haven't found a good solution to that yet, and everybody uses smartphones controlled by Apple and Google, communicate via channels controlled by Meta and so on.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    It's ok, European Union will enact another regulation saying that starting tomorrow we'll all be more innovative than the US.
- raxxorraxor 1y ago
  Europe needs a whole new engineering culture if it wants to stay relevant in this field. It still is focused on outsourcing problems, people are too lazy for details and demand ready to use products. I believe engineering in growing countries have completely different mindsets. They put the enterprise in enterprise and the results speak for themselves. Of course you have to stay pragmatic here and not every battle is in the interest of a company. But engineers with the ability to pursue their craft, sensible knowledge management and training have become a rare sight. So R&D is just plainly better in other countries. Problem is that this laziness of course empowers other players to grow to insane dimensions, like Microsoft did. Microsoft has many competent developers, but their success isn't due to software quality. Especially if you look at the latest cloud offerings. They are so large that they don't have to be good anymore.
hulitu 1y ago
> Essentially big tech is under the jurisdiction of the mad king, and of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the SEC etc.

wickedsight 1y ago

We are in such an insane bind here... We can see China and the US developing AI tooling (and other tech) at a high speed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of regulation and even active deregulation. In the EU, we won't be able to keep up with this speed because we tend to want to regulate first and many of our regulations hinder gathering the insane amounts of data needed. Falling behind on AI and not wanting to be dependent on tools from outside the EU will put us at a significant disadvantage in research and production of new technologies and we're already far behind in that aspect. We also don't want to drop our values just to keep up. Which is partially because we're still in the luxury position of being very rich. I wonder, though, whether we can keep this going in the current state of the world. Things seem to have changed massively in our disadvantage over the past 5 or so years.

holowoodman 1y ago
> We can see China and the US developing AI tooling (and other tech) at a high speed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of regulation and even active deregulation. In the EU, we won't be able to keep up with this speed because we tend to want to regulate first and many of our regulations hinder gathering the insane amounts of data needed. Oh, but the EU didn't just "tend to want to". They already did regulate AI in the most onerous possible way for AI users and producers. They even pride themselves on regulating before everyone else and before even knowing what they are regulating: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO...
pjc50 1y ago
It's not yet clear whether AI is so effective at actual work that it justifies throwing away privacy and even copyright law. But there do seem to still be open models if you think you need one.
- TheChaplain 1y ago
  I don't think he meant going to such absolute extremes... Regulation is good, it keeps actors in line and prevent cheating, but then overregulation comes into the picture and shoots them in the foot while expecting them to compete on the world stage. Think balance.

tormeh 1y ago

Wake me up when governments actually start writing checks. I bet the ICC will stay on Microsoft because doing anything else would be difficult. All anyone in big org IT knows is Microsoft, and no one wants to change.

holowoodman 1y ago
Oh, they are writing checks. They have been writing big checks to create GAIA-X and a few other things as the European alternative sovereign cloud. But basically no-one is using it because "but my Outlook doesn't work!". So it is all wasted money because of stupid bureaucrats and politicians as users who cannot be arsed to remember that their email isn't in Outlook anymore... You might say it is a little more complicated, but actually it isn't. Nobody wants any kind of change, so things stay as they are. Only the Americans can change things and change your Windows/Outlook/Azure, because then "it is like it is, we have to update"...
- raverbashing 1y ago
  Did Gaia-X ship anything besides web pages with fluff and more 'policy documents'? One line of functioning code?
  - holowoodman 1y ago
    Yes, there was something: https://gaia-x-hub.de/en/funding-projects/ https://gaia-x-hub.de/en/funding-projects/ But as always, most of it is pork for some cronies anyways. One related thing that has been developed/packaged is the "sovereign cloud stack" https://scs.community/ https://scs.community/ . However, it didn't see much use yet, for the reasons mentioned.
  - nosianu 1y ago
    In the last discussion about this that I read here and participated in, as someone who got paid from that fund for a while, I think the consensus was that the project was less meant to deliver something tangible, and more of a camouflaged general subsidy for participating European software firms.

mytailorisrich 1y ago

The ICC has nothing to do with Europe and the EU apart from being located in the Netherlands, unless there is a claim that it is not independent and partial (hum hum). The claim that it is "central to Europe’s commitment to human rights" to fluff their case is FUD basically to promote their products.

holowoodman 1y ago
The country where an international organisation is physically located tends to provide certain kinds of infrastructure and support besides the real estate.
thrance 1y ago
There you go, you answered your own question: the ICC is located in Europe. No need for pointless warcrimes denialism (hum hum).
pjc50 1y ago
The ICC is the legacy of the Nuremberg prosecutions.
AnAfrican 1y ago
It doesn't matter. It's an issue of "this could happen to us".

nanna 1y ago

European digital sovereignty in email depends on having a decent FOSS email client, but the best we have is Thunderbird. I hope TB can make up for all those years of lost time and catch up with Outlook. From their emails it seems like the focus is to compete with Exchange and to build smartphone clients. Personally I just really hope they find time to deal with the absolutely shoddy search.

sabellito 1y ago
I never used an email client in my life, I don't personally know anyone who does it either. I wonder what's the distribution between people who use clients vs just web.
- guappa 1y ago
  You also need a good open source web client then…
- lynx97 1y ago
  I never used a web based email client in my life, I don't personally know many people who still do so either.
hyperman1 1y ago
Not saying that Thunderbird is great, but ms Outlook has serious problems finding mails even for very specific keywords if it is older than a few months. They seem to hyper index recent mails and forget all else. Ironically, I have set up thunderbird as a client for my exchange email just for archival, and it does much better finding them.
raverbashing 1y ago
Honestly why? Why does "digital sovereignty" have to rely on stuff like "FOSS email client" Honestly, as much of FOSS has its importance, focusing exclusively on open source solutions is probably part of why things don't go ahead Honestly Thunderbird was good 20 years ago. And even then... Makeshift solutions with pieces duck-taped together and inconsistent UX are not going to win any friends

arresin 1y ago

Why are the good guys sanctioning ICC judges?

spwa4 1y ago
The relationship between the US and the ICC has been deteriorating for 3-4 decades now. The OIC effectively controls the ICC (they have the majority vote in electing judges), and the US fights terrorism. This used to be a huge complaint across African countries (because they had the same problem: African governments went pretty far in suppressing islamic insurgencies that threatened their existence. Of course the insurgencies committed 100x the human rights violations that those states did, but never got convicted)
- DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
  > The OIC effectively controls the ICC That's a pretty crazy claim. 125 countries have joined the ICC. The OIC only has 57 members (not all of them even have a Muslim majority). Of the three judges who issued the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, two are European (one is French, the other Slovenian). The US has the same problem with the ICC as it does with the ICJ: the US government does not want to be subject to international law. The US is used to acting as a superpower, in whatever way it wants. It just fundamentally does not accept the premise that its actions should be in any way constrained by international law. In this particular instance, the problem the US has with the ICC is that the US is Israel's primary backer. The US provides the money, weapons and diplomatic support that Israel needs to continue its war against the Palestinians and occupation of the Palestinian territories. The US itself is heavily implicated in the crimes that the ICC is prosecuting here.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Countries are sovereign and what is called "international law" are voluntary agreements among countries.
    - spwa4 1y ago

mg 1y ago

The article is about email. Europe could probably bring email "in-house". Large players like IONOS and OVH might help do it at scale. But what about AI? Soon all of our email will be pre-handled by our OpenAI assistant while we will be driven around by Waymo and a good part of our work is done by a Tesla humanoid robot. How can Europe catch up and do that in a sovereign way? For world-class AI, a country needs: 1 Photolithography 2 Wafers 3 GPUs 4 Software (SOTA Neural Networks) 5 Energy Components 2-5 seem not on the horizon on a world-class level in Europe. So Europe probably won't have the means to do AI "in-house" in the coming decades, right?

ricardobeat 1y ago
Photolithography is in the hands of Europe already, and that makes no difference. All that really matters at the moment is the software and where 'the cloud' resides. We already have AI in-house. Mistral is based in France, and their Le Chat platform hosted exclusively in the EU.
- mg 1y ago
  But does Mistral stand a chance to make a state of the art model? People will always want to use the best model. Like they use the best search engine. How would Mistral catch up with US companies, who spend tens of billions of dollars per year on improving their models? As far as I know, Mistral raised something like $1B so far.
- norman784 1y ago
  IIRC I read somewhere that ASML depends on some components provided by the US, if so, then it's not 100% in Europe hands yet.
  - guiraldelli 1y ago
    If nothing has changed in a few years, the dependency is only for the EUV machines, and that company was acquired by ASML. So keeping the company in USA is a favour they do to the country, not that they rely on it.

Certhas 1y ago

I agree with the argument, but... > [Would we allow a situation where] a foreign power could force them anytime to cut Europe’s power? We did just that with Russian gas imports. It took a massive effort to transition of these imports after Russia closed the tap.

StanislavPetrov 1y ago
It wasn't Russia who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline..
- holowoodman 1y ago
  But Russia stopped exporting gas through that pipeline using nonsensical excuses a few weeks before it was blown up by the Ukrainians. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream
  - StanislavPetrov 1y ago
    Nonsensical excuses like the people who wanted to buy their gas wouldn't pay them in their own currency? If I'm selling you my car, it is my right to say I only accept US dollars. If you insist on only offering me Mexican pesos, it isn't "nonsensical" when I say no, and refuse to sell you the car unless you pay US dollars. It is amazing how objective reality and basic common sense go out the window when it comes to the Ukraine/Russia situation. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gas-still-flows-russia-europe-buyers-navigate-putins-rouble-order-2022-04-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gas-still-flows-russ...
    - riffraff 1y ago
      The request for payment in rubles came about when contracts were already signed. If you unilaterally decide to change the terms of a contract it's quite obvious that the other party may not agree.
    - Certhas 1y ago

tallanvor 1y ago

The problem is that at some point you're always going to be subject to at least one country's laws, and at some point those laws will conflict with those of another country, even within the EU. Going on-prem is probably the safest, but you're still at risk of physical search and seizure as well as being subject to pressure placed on your ISP to cut you off if someone really wants it done.

guappa 1y ago
You speak as if in USA there wasn't a different tax code every 3km

j0057 1y ago

"Would Europe ever hand over control of its national power grids to foreign companies bound by non-European law? Would we trust a foreign supplier’s guarantee for 99.999% uptime (which is the standard uptime SLA agreement of cloud providers) while at the same time a foreign power could force them anytime to cut Europe’s power? Of course not." EU already does this: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plants-in-the-cloud/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-p... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018

mike_hearn 1y ago
Yes, and not only for electricity and the cloud. Also for 5G networks: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ Bert Hubert is good at identifying problems like this, but his proposed approach is always to demand the EU pass new laws even when the problem is Europeans asking people in foreign jurisdictions to run everything for them because they can do it better, partly due to not being under EU control. The cause of the problem is presented as the solution. The internet has a compressive effect on markets. Most markets can only sustain about 3-5 competitors before the number of choices becomes overwhelming and customers can no longer easily differentiate between them. If you offer your services over the internet, that means 3-5 competitors globally, and in turn that means hacking one of them can give you control over a huge chunk of the market. It also means it's easy to end up with all of those competitors being outside your jurisdiction if you aren't highly competitive.

pembrook 1y ago

Unfortunately the time to think about digital sovereignty was back in the 1970s. We've stacked on so many layers of abstraction to computing and every step of the way Europe missed the boat due to its underlying structural issues for investment and fragmented cultures/markets. It's quite frankly too late. Here's a NYT article from 34 years ago with the exact same story as today: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-in-computers.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Europe missed the PC, the internet, the smartphone, and is currently burying its head in the sand over AI. Dumping a bunch of money into building an inferior domestic version of Microsoft 365 just as it's about to be disrupted by AI-native paradigms would be the amusing cherry on top. It'd be like Apple moving the final cardboard packaging step to US factories and claiming their entire supply chain is 'sovereign.' Sure, China can't affect that last packaging step. But every layer of (far more important) abstraction below it they still have power over.

falcor84 1y ago

I'd appreciate a legal perspective on this - is the problem that Microsoft's EU operations are run by a corporate division rather than a standalone subsidiary? If it were an EU-based subsidiary that controlled the data about EU citizens, it would not be beholden to US executive orders, while still otherwise offering MS the ability to control global corporate strategy from its US HQ, right? EDIT: fixed s/division/subsidiary/ in the second paragraph

saubeidl 1y ago
As long as there's any US entity at any point in the chain, I don't think it's reliable. All this talk of divisions is marketing window dressing as far as I can tell. If decisions are made from the US, it will be used as a weapon against our sovereignty.
- vbezhenar 1y ago
  Linux kernel is developed in the US. Russia felt it hard way, when their developers were cut from submitting patches. One Trump word and Europe developers will follow. That's just an example. US is a locomotive for the whole computing. I want to underline that IT production chain is incredibly long and excluding US from this chain is impossible, simple as that.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    The kernel is open source. Very worst case, we'll maintain our own fork.
- pembrook 1y ago
  Except the US doesn't really care about Europe that much. Having a government bureaucracy try to rebuild the entire US cloud software ecosystem because of one four year presidential term (which is already dramatically losing popularity in the US) sounds wildly silly to me. Meanwhile turning away from the US means running into the arms of the Chinese for most things. And they are the much bigger threat to the EU economy given their superior manufacturing abilities -- which still today is the base of the EU's prosperity. Once European industrial companies start losing to the Chinese, it's over for Europe's entire way of life and the social benefits systems all collapse. I'm sure they'll try USSR-style blanket protectionism before this happens, but will just lead to falling even further behind.

rado 1y ago

The EU needs to take over Firefox, improve and support it, declaring independence

_vere 1y ago

I wish they weren't sued into providing a backdoor for the German government, I vastly prefer their corporate structure to proton, but I cant really trust to use a "encrypted" service with a government backdoor.

tuyeron 1y ago
Proof? There is no backdoor in Tuta, the code is here: https://github.com/tutao/tutanota https://github.com/tutao/tutanota
- _vere 1y ago
  There was a court case here a while ago because the feds wanted access to someone's emails. They won the case and forced tuta to build them a way into their system that allows them to get at non end to end encrypted emails before they get at-rest-encrypted. German article https://www.heise.de/news/Gericht-zwingt-Mailprovider-Tutanota-zu-Ueberwachungsfunktion-4972460.html https://www.heise.de/news/Gericht-zwingt-Mailprovider-Tutano... English article about the same topic https://hackread.com/encrypted-email-provider-tutanota-backdoor-service/ https://hackread.com/encrypted-email-provider-tutanota-backd... This essentially means they are forced to save a copy of the non encrypted emails somewhere, at least for german customers. You can argue its not a "backdoor" in the typical sense, since end to end encryption is still in place, but like, come on
  - Tutanota 1y ago
    Hi, Tuta Team here, we came across this and wanted to jump in. The facts are correct - thanks for explaining it the way it actually was. We explain in more detail here why this case highlights the need for *end-to-end encryption* and why we recommend everybody using it whenever possible: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ntzn3w/comment/h0vovbb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ntzn3w/comment/h0v...

rswail 1y ago

So there's numerous layers to this: 1. Where and how is the data stored and retrieved? This can be made local by forcing all data users/services to use an EU data storage service that is locally owned and operated and under EU jurisdiction. Access to the data would only be to the service delivery operator and the appropriate EU legal authorities. 2. Where and how is the data accessed? The data needs to be accessed by the service provider (eg an email service) to handle incoming updates and requests. The access could be limited to the required updates and inquiries, or otherwise logged so that the service provider is held accountable for access. 3. Where and how is the service accessible to legal authorities? For example, police warrants for an email inbox. The service provider should be required to identify and reveal publicly what data is available and how it is legally accessible if required. Given encryption, it may be that the service provider is unable to provide that access to anyone except the end user (eg Protonmail, Signal). 4. What control does the end user have over their data and the associated meta-data maintained by the service provider? GDPR covers a lot of ground here, including the right to be forgotten.

CursedSilicon 1y ago
Something you missed as well was 2018's "CLOUD Act" [1] Stealing from Wikipedia since frankly it's better articulated than I could do "The CLOUD Act was introduced following difficulties that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had with obtaining remote data through service providers through SCA warrants, as the SCA was written before cloud computing was a viable technology. The situation was highlighted from a 2013 drug trafficking investigation, during which the FBI issued an SCA warrant for emails that a U.S. citizen had stored on one of Microsoft's remote servers in Ireland, which Microsoft refused to provide." US Companies can't simply say "well that's in Europe. That's outside *our control*". The US truly considers its data reach to be global in nature when it comes to US companies. it's absolutely terrifying to think about [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
- rswail 1y ago
  That's why I'm suggesting that the data storage/retrieval supplier is EU owned and controlled. So in the case you quote, FBI can issue a warrant to Microsoft, but all they can do is pass it on to their data storage provider, who can reject it depending on EU law, not US law.

Havoc 1y ago

Yeah Europe really needs to step up here. It's a huge economic block. The whole chips fab thing may be a bridge too far for now, but the basics really should be doable. The newly launched EU DNS is a good start. Rules like taxpayer money needs to only fund open software etc need to be pushed. The large hosting providers need to be incentivized to build out more complete offerings that don't have gaping product holes vs big cloud etc. Both China and the US are aggressively pushing homegrown & favouring their own players. Time for the EU to do the same

Quarrel 1y ago
I agree with the rest, that it is all manageable, but at least: > The whole chips fab thing may be a bridge too far for now for this case, ASML, being Dutch, and crucial to essentially all cutting semiconductor production, gives Europe leverage. That said, a bit like Biden & Trump banning the export of certain tech to China, it is a slippery slope. Past a certain point they're just forced to develop the tech themselves. Hopefully Europe won't be as short-sighted or wilfully-ignorant, and will capitalise on their advantage here- as you are very correct to point out the ultimate vulnerability.
- ExoticPearTree 1y ago
  You forget one thing: ASML licenses american technology. They can't do anything out of the ordinary unless it has US' blessing. Hence, no leverage. Also, the machines are just one part of the equation. You need chip designs, you need actual foundries where these machines need to be installed and so on.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    If it really came to a falling out like this, why do you think US license rights would be considered at all?
    - klooney 1y ago
      ASML has a significant US research presence too. It's not just a bunch of dudes in Amsterdam.

jansenmac 1y ago

Microsoft did not block the email account of the ICC! This really is misinformation. See here: https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/ https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

smartmic 1y ago
I'm not any the wiser from the article - who did what and why doesn't Microsoft want to have done anything?
nalekberov 1y ago
I always found Tuta's exaggerated reaction ridiculous. What makes their stand even more questionable when I visit their EU alternatives [1] webpage, first category they list is 'Email', under this category only "eligible" alternative is Tuta Mail. Now, out of all alternative EU email providers they list only themselves as an alternative and expect alternative seekers to trust them? 1. https://tuta.com/blog/boycott-us-choose-european-products https://tuta.com/blog/boycott-us-choose-european-products
- antonyh 1y ago
  I noticed this too. It makes all their articles look like self-promotion.
AnAfrican 1y ago
Not the whole ICC but the sanctioned prosecutor has been disconnected ! >A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
jorams 1y ago
That article, and its many versions in other outlets, is a weird (successful) attempt at changing the narrative. The news that triggered all of it was that Microsoft cut off the ICC chief prosecutor's access to his email. Microsoft comes out saying "we did not cut services to the ICC, just its chief prosecutor". The media widely announces "Microsoft did not cut services to the ICC". That's not news, that's just marketing for Microsoft. The original news, and the claims by Tuta, are still correct: Microsoft cut off the ICC chief prosecutor's access to his email due to US sanctions.

KronisLV 1y ago

It seems like people agree that EU alternatives are nice and that open source software is great... but even in software development the people making the choices still opt for databases like Oracle or SQL Server and the large US-centric cloud providers, or even communication apps like Teams/Slack instead of just self-hosting Mattermost/Zulip/whatever. I don't think anyone is taking this seriously enough.

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
No one listens to the technical people that espouse the alternatives, partially due to the mainly-impenetrable language difference: business vs technical. Management would rather depend on "Microsoft" than "that employee that talks a lot without saying anything useful / understandable". That's a huge bridge to cross. Even under the mad king, I think most Management would prefer to remain dependent on Microsoft and go out of their way to avoid the ire of the The Kingdom of Trumpistan than to migrate their "everything computer" to a lesser known, lesser proven entity.
- pas 1y ago
  it's not a technical question simply. this is a business/operations risk management question. compliance, legal liability, BCP, regulatory environment flux, and so on. the case of the ICC obviously shows how little they cared about these things. MS closed the account? where are the offsite/independent backups? etc.
pas 1y ago
some do some don't. obviously most IT/software/tech businesses - especially weighted by capital, impact, influence, pedigree, and other factors of visibility and sales pushiness - are US based, so there's no point in caring too much about picking non-US vendors. and many European businesses are targeting the US market, so again not much they can do to escape the influence of Uncle Trump.

MaxPock 1y ago

Nothing has destroyed American goodwill than imposition of extra-territorial sanctions. Btw when the US imposed sanctions on Hong Kong leader ,she had to collect her salary in cash as no bank would process it.

waltercool 1y ago

[dead]

pabs3 1y ago

Digital sovereignty is not someone else's services using someone else's software on someone else's machines on someone else's networks. Its services you run, using software you control, on machines you bought, connected to networks you manage. So reject the cloud and self-host!

computerthings 1y ago

[dead]