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The International Criminal Court wants to become independent of USA technology

144 points by Tepix 1y ago

nathanaldensr 1y ago
Regardless of politics, it's still a good idea to try and avoid dependence on these globomegacorps that have revenues and market caps higher than the GDP of many countries. It seems like modern civilization is building toward an ultimate centralization of everything and we're just one catastrophic failure away from extreme societal problems of all kinds because of it.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  My hope is that all these "independent of US technologies" actually end up being "independent of for-profit companies" rather than about the specific technologies and companies involved, as what countries are "the good countries" change all the time, but non-profit/for-profit choices seem to last a lot longer than the status of any country.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    There's also the problem that "non-profit" is a weird, inconsistent designation that a lot of people get very rich on. I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of. Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement? edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)
    - wat10000 1y ago
      What is capitalism if not a particular way of making decisions?
      - throwaway894345 1y ago
        That’s kind of an interesting and profound question. I’m inclined to answer that it’s a way of efficiently allocating resources without making decisions in other words, there is no group voting about allocating resources. Of course, “efficiency” is probably in the eye of the beholder.
        wat10000 1y ago
        I would argue that the decisions are still made, first at the individual level choices, then as the larger behavior that emerges from them. The strange part is that you can't point to any specific entity making those larger choices (aside from "the economy" or whatever) but I'd say they're still being made. This ultimately comes down to how you want to define "decision" though.
        throwaway894345 1y ago
        Yep, I agree with this. No one is making macro scale resource allocation decisions and yet resources are allocated reasonably efficiently (for some value of “efficiency”). The collective “decision” is an emergent property of countless individual decisions, much like an ant colony exhibits complex and sophisticated decision making as an emergent property of simple individual decisions.
        wat10000 1y ago
        Or like a bunch of neurons doing their thing.
      - mothballed 1y ago
        Capitalism is arrived at through two primary ways One is utilitarianism. Capitalism, or possibly hybrid capitalism, depending on your viewpoint, has been correlated with the largest lift of people out of poverty in all of history. The other is ethical. If you start with the tenant that each man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and therefore the fruits of his labor. And that he can mix his labor with unclaimed natural resources, and thereby claim that mixed labor. And also, consensually trade those fruits with others, unmolested by 3rd party violence. Then you will end up with an economic system based on private property and capital largely controlled by for profit enterprise, which should approximate capitalism. I believe only in the utilitarian case might it be that it be intentionally arrived to as a method of making decisions, rather than the way decisions being made more as a byproduct.
  - hyghjiyhu 1y ago
    No man is an island. There must always be a dependency on the outside world. But you can reduce risk by using commodified products.
    - embedding-shape 1y ago
      Agree, but non-profits can rely on other non-profits, foundations or similar entities, rather than for-profit entities, and you're still collaborating with the world at large, just avoiding one particular hairball that has a tendency to infect everything it comes into touch with.
    - danaris 1y ago
      Sure. But this is exactly why we'd be better off with open-source software, hardware, etc, managed and maintained in a distributed fashion by nonprofits in many different countries. (I have no idea if there's legally such a thing as a "multinational nonprofit", though certainly such things exist in practice—eg, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders.) Any for-profit company is highly incentivized to keep their products proprietary, locked behind copyright, obfuscation, etc, or even provided only as SaaS. They are also highly incentivized to avoid the negative attention of the governments of any of the countries they operate in, because their primary goal is to remain profitable. Nonprofits do not have that requirement, and are much more likely to be able to attract people who are willing to defy oppressive, censorious, or outright fascist governments in order to continue to provide high-quality software & hardware to everyone without limitation or discrimination.
  - throwaway894345 1y ago
    Neither of these seem viable to me. You definitely can’t run an organization without doing business with for-profit companies. Probably the most feasible solution is diversifying dependencies so you can’t be extorted by any one country. EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?
    - epistasis 1y ago
      I have not had much luck in the past in getting substantive discussion around "profit" centered critiques. Except for once, and that individual person didn't have a problem with smaller companies making profits, it was only big companies, and I wasn't quite sure that they cared about profit as much as too much centralized control. So I'm commenting here as a bookmark to hopefully learn more, should you get some thoughtful responses.
      - throwaway894345 1y ago
        Yeah, looks like this one is no different. I’m not even sure what I said that was disagreeable!
  - epistasis 1y ago
    I don't think profit is the core problem here. It's control. A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization. Rather the key thing is having the source code, control of the deployment, and control of the infrastructure. There are plenty of places in there where profit is completely compatible with achieving full control.
    - embedding-shape 1y ago
      > A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization. Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"? Money perverse the actions of the for-profit companies, as suddenly you have someone like Tim Cook giving gifts to the president, as the survival of his company depends on a specific person having a good view of them personally. If neither of these companies were so hellbent on doing everything they can for profit, and instead focused on providing reliable, trustworthy and user-focused services, they wouldn't have that worry anymore. But of course, this is a pipe-dream and not at all realistic in the current climate.
      - degamad 1y ago
        As someone who previously was part of the management of a small non-profit, we absolutely cared about things that lead to us losing money... Now, we might have had good reason to pursue a plan that cost us money, but in general, threats to our funding are effectively threats to our existence.
      - epistasis 1y ago
        Non-profits follow the laws of the country where they are located. This means that if somebody like Trump decides to abuse their authority by placing sanctions on ICC prosecutors, the non-profit Microsoft will similarly follow local law, or be at risk of other enforcement actions against them. Profit and money have nothing to do with what the ICC was reacting to. It's about power, law, and autocracy.
      - 1y ago
- wat10000 1y ago
  All those scifi stories where giant corporations rule the planet and national governments fade into irrelevancy are looking awfully prescient.
mystraline 1y ago
Thats a good idea for any government and major org. Data sovereignty is such a massively huge issue. But when some nameless market-droid can go "pay us more in 10 days or we purge everything", or "account disabled" - those can absolutely wreck an org. Now, non-critical stuff happens. And use 3rd party services for those. The key there is cancellation isn't a big deal. But the moment they do turn critical, replicate in-house. Also, keep in mind that the AP reported killing Hague's ICC contracts. Lots of misinformation, but this is the starting point. 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...
ArcHound 1y ago
I remember writing about this one. Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector. Migrating away all of the legacy systems is nigh impossible. Then you'd have to retrain all staff. While this is not justified from an economic perspective one can only hope that these institutions have higher values to adhere to. EDIT: This is great news, I should be more optimistic about this effort.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  It doesn't appear to be impossible; two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  > Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector Thanks! Marathons aren't won by speed or doing everything at once, but progressing towards a far away goal step by step, and surely we'll need all the "good lucks" we can receive. I'll disagree it's nigh impossible, and find such defeatist perspectives well, defeatists. One shall have hope we can continuously improve things by taking care of what decisions we make, this hopefully is one of those steps.
  - ArcHound 1y ago
    I agree that my perspective could use more optimism, after all, the sibling comment highlighted a couple success cases. You are right. We need to make an effort, start small and tackle this issue step by step. I do support this effort and I think these are great news. I stand by the comment of this being dependent on a commitment to higher values than "cheapest ok solution" which is all too common in the private sector.
epistasis 1y ago
Reminder for those that don't click through: Microsoft killed the email account of an ICC prosecutor, at the request of Trump: > According to Handelsblatt, the decision is to be seen against the backdrop of sanctions by the current US administration under President Donald Trump against employees such as Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Microsoft simply blocked his email access. He therefore had to switch to the Swiss email service Proton. Since the ICC is highly dependent on service providers like Microsoft, its work is being paralyzed, it was stated in May. While there are clear financial wins too, basic sovereignty is at stake.
- wang_li 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    If your concern is genuinely sovereignty, you should be appalled that the US is attempting to take away sovereignty from ICC member states.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  Yeah, seems like a no-brainer to react to something like that. Is there anyone in any circumstances that wouldn't want to move as far away from a company like Microsoft who acts on the whims like that? Even as a business strategy, it doesn't make any sense, but seems most companies are trying to kiss the ring of the king, rather than focusing on providing stable, robust and trustworthy services, so you reap what you sow.
  - kjksf 1y ago
    Microsoft, being a U.S. company, had no choice in the matter. U.S. imposed sanctions on the guy. One component of sanctions is "Prohibition on U.S. persons (individuals or entities) conducting business or transactions with Khan." If Microsoft didn't cancel his account it would be breaking the law by "conducting business or transactions with Khan." So yeah, it makes sense for ICC to switch to a non-US provider, e.g. one in Germany, but it's not 100% solution because U.S. can impose secondary sanctions i.e. sanction the German company. I don't know if ICC sanctions include secondary sanctions but U.S. did that for Russian oil i.e. they said if e.g. Indian company buys Russian oil, they'll sanction Indian company too.
bijant 1y ago
It's quite funny that they will switch to german technology now, because I can think of no german service provider that would not immediately comply with any and all US sanctions.
- clort 1y ago
  Sanctions are official, but Trump phoning up the CEO and whining about nonsense is something else. I'd be concerned that a US company would be vastly more likely to fold from the latter than a German one would. Sanctions enacted against a German or EU company on a whim would perhaps cause some international response.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    In this case it was official sanctions enacted on a whim against a person, the ICC prosecutor.
    - clort 1y ago
      Point taken, but reading that official sanction just shows a load of whining. However, I was able to read it, which would not be the case if he had just phoned Nadella. Who knows, perhaps he did and Nadella refused to play? I see that he did not attend the inauguration..
      - epistasis 1y ago
        Right, it is definitely whining. But it also makes the case that it's risky to depend on services from a US company, as the whims of a tyrant may force all US companies to cut ties. I doubt Trump even knew how the sanctions would play out, in terms of all the effects on the ICC. But the IT services are a clear one for the HN crowd to pay attention to.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  If Trump asked a german company hosting a politicians email to shut down access to their emails, would they really comply with that? Because that's what happened with the ICC it seems, and why we're seeing this move right now.
darreninthenet 1y ago
Many years ago, all organisations - "Hey we can cut costs by getting rid of all of our expensive experts and not running our own data centres!" Many years later - "Oh no! Not running our own data centres means our data is no longer fully in our control!" Who would have thought it!
- spwa4 1y ago
  And of course, equally surprising, it turns out getting services from US companies "but your data stays in the EU" means exactly nothing.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    The responsible executive should be jailed for many years for massive fraud. Even if such a court decision in another country won't be enforced by the US against their citizens, it will likely mean that the responsible executive won't be able to enter quite a list of countries anymore.
- mothballed 1y ago
  It sounds as if this was kicked off in response to an MS e-mail account being shut off. I'd like to see how well it goes for you if you run your own e-mail server. Even when I did that in the near dot-com days, it was already getting locked down to the point you would get filtered out going into any of the big boys to the point it was largely a futile effort. It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    > It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider. I feel like this point is maybe outdated, or possibly never been right. I've run my own email servers for many years, helped friends setup their own servers too, last time around April this year, and neither of us have this issue that everyone always brings up whenever people start talking about self-hosted email. Is this particular problem something you have personally faced lately, or are you parroting a "known typical problem"? Make sure you setup all the right DNS records, double-check IPs/domains against spam lists, set the right headers and you're unlikely to have issues here, even when sending emails to large US providers (I've manually tested this with Outlook, AOL and Gmail, neither have these issues).
timbit42 1y ago
The article mentions OpenDesk. Did they mean OpenDesktop?
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  Probably they meant OpenDesk as it's a real thing, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior: https://www.opendesk.eu/en https://www.opendesk.eu/en
heinrich5991 1y ago
https://archive.today/8BuB9 https://archive.today/8BuB9
jongjong 1y ago
No government should be using big tech products. It's essentially corruption IMO. There are so many smaller, cheaper, better alternatives. And these days, building software is not that difficult. There are a lot of open source stacks to start with.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  I'd love to see more support for locally developed solutions, but many of the governments in the EU are just reaching out to the most popular cross-EU businesses, often German or Austrian, instead of their local companies. But then I guess the argument could be made for that you should go for the best option possible, as long as it's within EU, and I can certainly see the point of that too.
- tobinfekkes 1y ago
  > building software is not that difficult. Maintaining it is.
  - jongjong 1y ago
    I disagree with this as well to some extent. I see how much big corporations spend on "maintenance" and all the bureaucracy involved. It's easy money for them and their employees. Too easy. The problem with Europe is that they starved their tech sector completely. IMO neglectful to the point of corruption. The salaries of EU-based engineers was just laughable compared to US. And they outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions, compromised by foreign nations from all sides. In terms of tech, EU governments have been extremely incompetent... They could not have failed worse if they tried. So now there is a lot of fixing to do. Radical fixing.
    - tobinfekkes 1y ago
      > the EU outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions Is that very different than the US? That seems more like a timeless endeavor, not a European tech one.
NietTim 1y ago
It's always been an odd choice to build infra on services owned by companies from a country which doesn't recognise the ICC and, even worse, has a special law that if any of US service men were ever tried there, they will invade the Hague. (gotta love the good guys)
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Dropping a cite for the last bit, as it's so goofy people tend to think it's made up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
  - excalibur 1y ago
    Passed in August 2002, how very Patriot Act of them.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      To be fair, the Rome Statute entered into force in July 2002.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    It's a great example from 2002 that demonstrates that while the US have ramped up its isolationism efforts lately, it has been moving in the same direction for a long time, so what's happening now shouldn't be so surprising.
    - abandonliberty 1y ago
      Many people raised the alarm back then, and were shouted down by promises that these laws would only be used when appropriate. In 2002, very few would've been okay with tearing apart American families, parents, and children based on the color of their skin, letting women miscarry through malnutrition while in custody, etc. Just wait 25 years, buy the media, and slowly brainwash the population. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, and likely has roots that go much further back. Difficult for a democracy to defend against this type of long term attack.
chalo124 1y ago
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chalo124 1y ago
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greatgib 1y ago
That is the good electroshock that was needed to start doing good things. But: "Zendis is part of an EU-level organisation that four EU countries founded on Tuesday with the aim of building sovereign digital infrastructure." My intuition: That is the usual European recipe for disaster. A public funded initiative to waste money in the usual way by giving it indirectly to consulting groups while producing nothing concrete and having to be scraped after a few years. At the same time, a big part of the money will be use to fund largely a big group of useless executives, representatives, communicators, and have countless workshops and conferences. At the same time, almost zero money will go to the real existing Open Source project, their developers and maintainers.

144 points by Tepix 1y ago

Regardless of politics, it's still a good idea to try and avoid dependence on these globomegacorps that have revenues and market caps higher than the GDP of many countries. It seems like modern civilization is building toward an ultimate centralization of everything and we're just one catastrophic failure away from extreme societal problems of all kinds because of it.

embedding-shape 1y ago
My hope is that all these "independent of US technologies" actually end up being "independent of for-profit companies" rather than about the specific technologies and companies involved, as what countries are "the good countries" change all the time, but non-profit/for-profit choices seem to last a lot longer than the status of any country.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  There's also the problem that "non-profit" is a weird, inconsistent designation that a lot of people get very rich on. I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of. Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement? edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)
  - wat10000 1y ago
    What is capitalism if not a particular way of making decisions?
    - throwaway894345 1y ago
      That’s kind of an interesting and profound question. I’m inclined to answer that it’s a way of efficiently allocating resources without making decisions in other words, there is no group voting about allocating resources. Of course, “efficiency” is probably in the eye of the beholder.
      - wat10000 1y ago
        I would argue that the decisions are still made, first at the individual level choices, then as the larger behavior that emerges from them. The strange part is that you can't point to any specific entity making those larger choices (aside from "the economy" or whatever) but I'd say they're still being made. This ultimately comes down to how you want to define "decision" though.
        throwaway894345 1y ago
        Yep, I agree with this. No one is making macro scale resource allocation decisions and yet resources are allocated reasonably efficiently (for some value of “efficiency”). The collective “decision” is an emergent property of countless individual decisions, much like an ant colony exhibits complex and sophisticated decision making as an emergent property of simple individual decisions.
        wat10000 1y ago
        Or like a bunch of neurons doing their thing.
    - mothballed 1y ago
      Capitalism is arrived at through two primary ways One is utilitarianism. Capitalism, or possibly hybrid capitalism, depending on your viewpoint, has been correlated with the largest lift of people out of poverty in all of history. The other is ethical. If you start with the tenant that each man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and therefore the fruits of his labor. And that he can mix his labor with unclaimed natural resources, and thereby claim that mixed labor. And also, consensually trade those fruits with others, unmolested by 3rd party violence. Then you will end up with an economic system based on private property and capital largely controlled by for profit enterprise, which should approximate capitalism. I believe only in the utilitarian case might it be that it be intentionally arrived to as a method of making decisions, rather than the way decisions being made more as a byproduct.
- hyghjiyhu 1y ago
  No man is an island. There must always be a dependency on the outside world. But you can reduce risk by using commodified products.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    Agree, but non-profits can rely on other non-profits, foundations or similar entities, rather than for-profit entities, and you're still collaborating with the world at large, just avoiding one particular hairball that has a tendency to infect everything it comes into touch with.
  - danaris 1y ago
    Sure. But this is exactly why we'd be better off with open-source software, hardware, etc, managed and maintained in a distributed fashion by nonprofits in many different countries. (I have no idea if there's legally such a thing as a "multinational nonprofit", though certainly such things exist in practice—eg, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders.) Any for-profit company is highly incentivized to keep their products proprietary, locked behind copyright, obfuscation, etc, or even provided only as SaaS. They are also highly incentivized to avoid the negative attention of the governments of any of the countries they operate in, because their primary goal is to remain profitable. Nonprofits do not have that requirement, and are much more likely to be able to attract people who are willing to defy oppressive, censorious, or outright fascist governments in order to continue to provide high-quality software & hardware to everyone without limitation or discrimination.
- throwaway894345 1y ago
  Neither of these seem viable to me. You definitely can’t run an organization without doing business with for-profit companies. Probably the most feasible solution is diversifying dependencies so you can’t be extorted by any one country. EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?
  - epistasis 1y ago
    I have not had much luck in the past in getting substantive discussion around "profit" centered critiques. Except for once, and that individual person didn't have a problem with smaller companies making profits, it was only big companies, and I wasn't quite sure that they cared about profit as much as too much centralized control. So I'm commenting here as a bookmark to hopefully learn more, should you get some thoughtful responses.
    - throwaway894345 1y ago
      Yeah, looks like this one is no different. I’m not even sure what I said that was disagreeable!
- epistasis 1y ago
  I don't think profit is the core problem here. It's control. A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization. Rather the key thing is having the source code, control of the deployment, and control of the infrastructure. There are plenty of places in there where profit is completely compatible with achieving full control.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    > A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization. Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"? Money perverse the actions of the for-profit companies, as suddenly you have someone like Tim Cook giving gifts to the president, as the survival of his company depends on a specific person having a good view of them personally. If neither of these companies were so hellbent on doing everything they can for profit, and instead focused on providing reliable, trustworthy and user-focused services, they wouldn't have that worry anymore. But of course, this is a pipe-dream and not at all realistic in the current climate.
    - degamad 1y ago
      As someone who previously was part of the management of a small non-profit, we absolutely cared about things that lead to us losing money... Now, we might have had good reason to pursue a plan that cost us money, but in general, threats to our funding are effectively threats to our existence.
    - epistasis 1y ago
      Non-profits follow the laws of the country where they are located. This means that if somebody like Trump decides to abuse their authority by placing sanctions on ICC prosecutors, the non-profit Microsoft will similarly follow local law, or be at risk of other enforcement actions against them. Profit and money have nothing to do with what the ICC was reacting to. It's about power, law, and autocracy.
    - 1y ago
wat10000 1y ago
All those scifi stories where giant corporations rule the planet and national governments fade into irrelevancy are looking awfully prescient.

mystraline 1y ago

Thats a good idea for any government and major org. Data sovereignty is such a massively huge issue. But when some nameless market-droid can go "pay us more in 10 days or we purge everything", or "account disabled" - those can absolutely wreck an org. Now, non-critical stuff happens. And use 3rd party services for those. The key there is cancellation isn't a big deal. But the moment they do turn critical, replicate in-house. Also, keep in mind that the AP reported killing Hague's ICC contracts. Lots of misinformation, but this is the starting point. 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...

ArcHound 1y ago

I remember writing about this one. Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector. Migrating away all of the legacy systems is nigh impossible. Then you'd have to retrain all staff. While this is not justified from an economic perspective one can only hope that these institutions have higher values to adhere to. EDIT: This is great news, I should be more optimistic about this effort.

ceejayoz 1y ago
It doesn't appear to be impossible; two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485
embedding-shape 1y ago
> Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector Thanks! Marathons aren't won by speed or doing everything at once, but progressing towards a far away goal step by step, and surely we'll need all the "good lucks" we can receive. I'll disagree it's nigh impossible, and find such defeatist perspectives well, defeatists. One shall have hope we can continuously improve things by taking care of what decisions we make, this hopefully is one of those steps.
- ArcHound 1y ago
  I agree that my perspective could use more optimism, after all, the sibling comment highlighted a couple success cases. You are right. We need to make an effort, start small and tackle this issue step by step. I do support this effort and I think these are great news. I stand by the comment of this being dependent on a commitment to higher values than "cheapest ok solution" which is all too common in the private sector.

epistasis 1y ago

Reminder for those that don't click through: Microsoft killed the email account of an ICC prosecutor, at the request of Trump: > According to Handelsblatt, the decision is to be seen against the backdrop of sanctions by the current US administration under President Donald Trump against employees such as Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Microsoft simply blocked his email access. He therefore had to switch to the Swiss email service Proton. Since the ICC is highly dependent on service providers like Microsoft, its work is being paralyzed, it was stated in May. While there are clear financial wins too, basic sovereignty is at stake.

wang_li 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  If your concern is genuinely sovereignty, you should be appalled that the US is attempting to take away sovereignty from ICC member states.
embedding-shape 1y ago
Yeah, seems like a no-brainer to react to something like that. Is there anyone in any circumstances that wouldn't want to move as far away from a company like Microsoft who acts on the whims like that? Even as a business strategy, it doesn't make any sense, but seems most companies are trying to kiss the ring of the king, rather than focusing on providing stable, robust and trustworthy services, so you reap what you sow.
- kjksf 1y ago
  Microsoft, being a U.S. company, had no choice in the matter. U.S. imposed sanctions on the guy. One component of sanctions is "Prohibition on U.S. persons (individuals or entities) conducting business or transactions with Khan." If Microsoft didn't cancel his account it would be breaking the law by "conducting business or transactions with Khan." So yeah, it makes sense for ICC to switch to a non-US provider, e.g. one in Germany, but it's not 100% solution because U.S. can impose secondary sanctions i.e. sanction the German company. I don't know if ICC sanctions include secondary sanctions but U.S. did that for Russian oil i.e. they said if e.g. Indian company buys Russian oil, they'll sanction Indian company too.

bijant 1y ago

It's quite funny that they will switch to german technology now, because I can think of no german service provider that would not immediately comply with any and all US sanctions.

clort 1y ago
Sanctions are official, but Trump phoning up the CEO and whining about nonsense is something else. I'd be concerned that a US company would be vastly more likely to fold from the latter than a German one would. Sanctions enacted against a German or EU company on a whim would perhaps cause some international response.
- epistasis 1y ago
  In this case it was official sanctions enacted on a whim against a person, the ICC prosecutor.
  - clort 1y ago
    Point taken, but reading that official sanction just shows a load of whining. However, I was able to read it, which would not be the case if he had just phoned Nadella. Who knows, perhaps he did and Nadella refused to play? I see that he did not attend the inauguration..
    - epistasis 1y ago
      Right, it is definitely whining. But it also makes the case that it's risky to depend on services from a US company, as the whims of a tyrant may force all US companies to cut ties. I doubt Trump even knew how the sanctions would play out, in terms of all the effects on the ICC. But the IT services are a clear one for the HN crowd to pay attention to.
embedding-shape 1y ago
If Trump asked a german company hosting a politicians email to shut down access to their emails, would they really comply with that? Because that's what happened with the ICC it seems, and why we're seeing this move right now.

darreninthenet 1y ago

Many years ago, all organisations - "Hey we can cut costs by getting rid of all of our expensive experts and not running our own data centres!" Many years later - "Oh no! Not running our own data centres means our data is no longer fully in our control!" Who would have thought it!

spwa4 1y ago
And of course, equally surprising, it turns out getting services from US companies "but your data stays in the EU" means exactly nothing.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  The responsible executive should be jailed for many years for massive fraud. Even if such a court decision in another country won't be enforced by the US against their citizens, it will likely mean that the responsible executive won't be able to enter quite a list of countries anymore.
mothballed 1y ago
It sounds as if this was kicked off in response to an MS e-mail account being shut off. I'd like to see how well it goes for you if you run your own e-mail server. Even when I did that in the near dot-com days, it was already getting locked down to the point you would get filtered out going into any of the big boys to the point it was largely a futile effort. It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  > It's not easy getting your service white-listed, and even if you do they're still likely back at the spot of going straight to spam when messaging to any US based large provider. I feel like this point is maybe outdated, or possibly never been right. I've run my own email servers for many years, helped friends setup their own servers too, last time around April this year, and neither of us have this issue that everyone always brings up whenever people start talking about self-hosted email. Is this particular problem something you have personally faced lately, or are you parroting a "known typical problem"? Make sure you setup all the right DNS records, double-check IPs/domains against spam lists, set the right headers and you're unlikely to have issues here, even when sending emails to large US providers (I've manually tested this with Outlook, AOL and Gmail, neither have these issues).

timbit42 1y ago

The article mentions OpenDesk. Did they mean OpenDesktop?

embedding-shape 1y ago
Probably they meant OpenDesk as it's a real thing, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior: https://www.opendesk.eu/en https://www.opendesk.eu/en

heinrich5991 1y ago

https://archive.today/8BuB9 https://archive.today/8BuB9

jongjong 1y ago

No government should be using big tech products. It's essentially corruption IMO. There are so many smaller, cheaper, better alternatives. And these days, building software is not that difficult. There are a lot of open source stacks to start with.

embedding-shape 1y ago
I'd love to see more support for locally developed solutions, but many of the governments in the EU are just reaching out to the most popular cross-EU businesses, often German or Austrian, instead of their local companies. But then I guess the argument could be made for that you should go for the best option possible, as long as it's within EU, and I can certainly see the point of that too.
tobinfekkes 1y ago
> building software is not that difficult. Maintaining it is.
- jongjong 1y ago
  I disagree with this as well to some extent. I see how much big corporations spend on "maintenance" and all the bureaucracy involved. It's easy money for them and their employees. Too easy. The problem with Europe is that they starved their tech sector completely. IMO neglectful to the point of corruption. The salaries of EU-based engineers was just laughable compared to US. And they outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions, compromised by foreign nations from all sides. In terms of tech, EU governments have been extremely incompetent... They could not have failed worse if they tried. So now there is a lot of fixing to do. Radical fixing.
  - tobinfekkes 1y ago
    > the EU outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions Is that very different than the US? That seems more like a timeless endeavor, not a European tech one.

NietTim 1y ago

It's always been an odd choice to build infra on services owned by companies from a country which doesn't recognise the ICC and, even worse, has a special law that if any of US service men were ever tried there, they will invade the Hague. (gotta love the good guys)

ceejayoz 1y ago
Dropping a cite for the last bit, as it's so goofy people tend to think it's made up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
- excalibur 1y ago
  Passed in August 2002, how very Patriot Act of them.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    To be fair, the Rome Statute entered into force in July 2002.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  It's a great example from 2002 that demonstrates that while the US have ramped up its isolationism efforts lately, it has been moving in the same direction for a long time, so what's happening now shouldn't be so surprising.
  - abandonliberty 1y ago
    Many people raised the alarm back then, and were shouted down by promises that these laws would only be used when appropriate. In 2002, very few would've been okay with tearing apart American families, parents, and children based on the color of their skin, letting women miscarry through malnutrition while in custody, etc. Just wait 25 years, buy the media, and slowly brainwash the population. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, and likely has roots that go much further back. Difficult for a democracy to defend against this type of long term attack.

chalo124 1y ago

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chalo124 1y ago

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greatgib 1y ago

That is the good electroshock that was needed to start doing good things. But: "Zendis is part of an EU-level organisation that four EU countries founded on Tuesday with the aim of building sovereign digital infrastructure." My intuition: That is the usual European recipe for disaster. A public funded initiative to waste money in the usual way by giving it indirectly to consulting groups while producing nothing concrete and having to be scraped after a few years. At the same time, a big part of the money will be use to fund largely a big group of useless executives, representatives, communicators, and have countless workshops and conferences. At the same time, almost zero money will go to the real existing Open Source project, their developers and maintainers.