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

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

by Sami_Lehtinen • 1 year ago

1403 734 1 year ago

berthub.eu

oldpersonintx• 1 year ago

you've had twenty years to build an EU-native alternative...what do you have to show us?

the EU has settled for using US tech but just taxing the success with fines

unixhero• 1 year ago

GDPR is a great incentive to build better products. Pre-gdpr there was a lot of sloppyness.

jfengel• 1 year ago

What they have to show us is two decades of not wasting time on problems someone else has solved. Capitalism at its finest.

Now someone has thrown a monkey wrench at the invisible hand, and they have to duplicate a lot of effort. They lose, we lose. But at least they've stopped tying their future to an unreliable business partner. Divorce sucks for everyone.

morkalork2• 1 year ago

That's basically it isn't it? Try going to any institutional investor asking for money to build a sovereign replacement for Google Docs or whatever in the last 15 years.

senand2• 1 year ago

That's true. They were numerous attempts to introduce a European alternative, which (more-or-less) failed. The US cloud providers are years ahead. However, the EU is suffering from that; the US companies pay some taxes, but far less than you possibly believe, and it conversely doesn't have any tax revenue from their own companies. Not to mention the political and data independence that are now more necessary than ever.

qaq• 1 year ago

EU actually built solutions that people that care about $ use like OVH and Hetzner.

wiether• 1 year ago

I have never worked with companies that chose OVH or Hetzner (or Scaleway or any other EU provider) for something else than doing things cheap.

They don't care at all about the provider being a local or European company. They just want the cheapest option.

Which usually means using the same server to host dev/UAT/prod, and also using the extra storage available to store company data unrelated to the workloads hosted on the server.

Whereas the companies that are using big clouds are more focused on doing things with more care, and trying to avoid as much disaster as possible.

But I guess having PII data exposed on the web from an Hetzner server is better than having everything encrypted on AWS...

ranger_danger3• 1 year ago

There are many EU-native cloud alternatives.

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...

Hetzner is another big one that is for some reason not listed.

blagie5• 1 year ago

Most of them are horrible.

I'd love to have a good Google Docs alternative. No one has made one. Nextcloud is the closest we've got, and I use it sometimes, but it's pretty bad.

It's a lot less hard to build in 2025, and hopefully, someone will now.

otterley4• 1 year ago

Hetzner isn’t really a full-service cloud provider. They provide machines and storage for rent. It’s the first rung on the ladder to becoming a cloud provider, but they’ve got a long way to go.

magicalhippo• 1 year ago

Like, of those, which provide managed services like storage (blob and smb), ampq message queue, databases in a fairly cohesive way and easily accessible from C#?

I just checked a handful but didn't see any.

ulfw• 1 year ago

Wow propaganda bullshit straight on Hackernews. This what it has come to. After over a decade here I didn't expect to see the deterioration coming, but it's not surprising considering the state and division of your country.

blagie5• 1 year ago

I mean, isn't the US saying that taxing imports is an ideal source of revenue?

But at the end of the day, there was never any real incentive to make an EU-native alternative. Now, there is. The US is in an uncertain state. Will American be great again? A fascist dictatorship? Argentina? Who the heck knows. Right now, we have a lot of speculation about what's going on and precious little information.

Unreliable partners give a very, very strong incentive to have critical infrastructure local.

Beyond that, what's the downside? Before, it risked triggering a trade war. Seems we're there already, and going local just gives a stronger hand.

graemep6• 1 year ago

The British government only fairly recently decided it needed to remove Chinese cameras from sensitive sites. They were complete happy to, for a long time, to give that power to a country that is an actual fascist dictatorship.

Governments are too short termist to care. Its probably OK for the next few years so keep it cheap

The danger is not just governments. Its businesses, and even consumer systems. If another country can brick all your vehicles or look through all your spy cameras or take down your telecoms then they have a great deal of power over you.

This will only change after something happens.

sudosysgen• 1 year ago

OVH and Hetzner are quite decent and popular. The alternative does exist and I've used it a bunch, it works.

codethief2• 1 year ago

Most companies I know (and/or have worked for) pay a lot of attention to where exactly their stuff is being hosted, partly due to GDPR. It might not be a Europe-native hoster but in most cases it will still be a data center in Europe (operated by AWS/Azure/GCP).

senand2• 1 year ago

Which doesn't protect these companies. The CLOUD act allows the US to access the data even if hosted outside of the US, if it's a US company - since 2018. That has been a looming threat ever since, but is now more perilous than ever.

jeffrallen2• 1 year ago

You and your colleagues probably need to learn more about the CLOUD Act, because it has changed the rules you thought you were operating under.

A useful resource: https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-tr...

llm_nerd• 1 year ago

For decades, the technology center of the universe has been Silicon Valley. No matter where you lived -- Canada, the UK, Germany, India -- if you wanted to be serious, you moved to the US. And if you had a company, being acquired by a Silicon Valley company was basically the goal. In the same way that you had to move to LA if you wanted to do anything serious in the entertainment industry.

So every innovation and success ends up being sucked into the gravity well of Silicon Valley. Every talent ends up having to move to the US to be credible. Soon everything is "American". The great innovation center of the universe, fueled by foreigners and acquired foreign businesses.

Will this continue? That is hugely to be seen.

refulgentis• 1 year ago

Uh, isnt Hetzner HNs favorite host?

jonathanstrange2• 1 year ago

We're using Hetzner and BunnyCDN, never store any data on US servers. The decision for it is independent of the current political situation, mostly to avoid the US legal system as best as we can and to ensure GDPR-compliance.

There are plenty of other alternatives, e.g. Softmaker Office and Papyrus are German word processor and office applications.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

The EU is a pretty capitalist organization (I mean the single market is a big part of it). I think they have trouble competing with US tech companies because of our economies of scale, and widespread use of anti-competitive business practices, general inertia, and the tendency of the US to brain drain the rest of the world. I guess, fortunately for you guys, we’re trying to throw away many of our advantages.

ebiester• 1 year ago

There are enough tech people that are ready to brain drain from here right now - some well placed money would go a long way right now if Germany, France, the Netherlands, or another tech hub was ready.

watwut8• 1 year ago

Yeah, it is call free trade. Paying to someone else. You know the trade deficit thing? Selling these things made it smaller.

You will surprised, but American businesses benefit from selling their services.

megous3• 1 year ago

Locally (in my country) managed virtual machines, or managed hosting services (1990-2000s variant of "git push" (ftp) your PHP app somewhere and have the website running, that US companies re-invented as "git push" to deploy, while somehow managing to invert the "app" hosting vs VM cost relationship at the same time, making managed hosting more expensive).

At work we rely on "big" clouds offered by major telecom companies. AWS is seen as ridiculously expensive "religious requirement" to gain trust, if we'd ever decide to market our product to US customers, but little else.

Big benefit of smaller countries and local apps. We can more easily fit apps on one to a few computers and don't need your hyperscaling clouds to serve the entire world, because our world is 10 mil. people.

jmclnx• 1 year ago

I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry in Europe. If I was in Europe, I would never use any US Tech products.

Maybe Linux will end up making big inroads in Europe, replacing Windows and MicroSoft Office and Office 365 along with Google Docs.

y-curious• 1 year ago

I thought you were being serious til I read your last paragraph. Well done

SideburnsOfDoom5• 1 year ago

A new term seen recently: "The MAGA cloud companies": Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon.

scarab925• 1 year ago

Except, MAGA hate all those companies. They view them as non-ideologically diverse breeding grounds for progressives.

odiroot2• 1 year ago

Why Apple? Oracle would probably fit better with others. Or even IBM.

baxtr• 1 year ago

I get your point. It’s almost impossible at the stage we are at right now.

But what’s the alternative?

SpicyLemonZest• 1 year ago

There’s not a great alternative in the next few months, perhaps not in the next few years, but in the longer term European countries should take this as a critical warning. Failing to cultivate a domestic software industry in 2025 is like failing to cultivate a domestic manufacturing industry in 1825.

drysine2• 1 year ago

Russia can do that, so can Europe.

watwut8• 1 year ago

The law about EU data having to be on the servers located in EU already exists.

croes10• 1 year ago

Doesn‘t matter thanks to the CloudAct.

jorvi• 1 year ago

Yup you already can specifically sequester your data to Microsoft's or Amazon's EU-only servers, and even smaller companies like 1Password offer to store your data on 1password.eu instead of 1password.com.

However there can be weirdness sometimes. I vaguely remember a case where Microsoft had to hand over EU data to a US law enforcement agency due to a court order, but giving that data would violate Irish law. I know there's a new variant of the EU-US Privacy Shield, but with the current US administration that could get ignored very easily.

Which raises the question: can for example Microsoft-the-US-entity in de jure sense cleave off Microsoft-the-EU-entity whilst still maintaining de facto connection between the two? If not, there are definitely big opportunities abound.

anaisbetts• 1 year ago

I just don't know how this makes any meaningful difference towards the threat model of the US gov't becoming compromised if a US company still controls said servers and the CLOUD Act allows the US gov't to freely subpoena the contents of those servers. The companies involved will still do what the US says because they are forced to.

Like, the conversation will go, "Get us this data"; "EU law says we're not allowed to"; "We don't care, do it or we shut you down."

vachina• 1 year ago

European companies are so deeply entrenched in American software ecosystem I can’t even. Just this past week my EU company deployed an agentic LLM hosted on Microsoft Azure with models developed by… Microsoft, on top of the existing GPT hosted on the same platform. They also recently moved their entire in-house HR platform to Oracle.

It’s no mistake China banned foreign companies with infinite money from setting up shop there. It is dangerous and expensive in the long run.

toomuchtodo4• 1 year ago

But would they still if the EU used tariff like policy to prohibit it? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best time is now." Make the law, enforce the law, encourage the behavior and outcomes necessary to achieve the success criteria.

As someone with an infra background a lifetime ago, I am confident I could spin up Kubernetes and Deepseek R1 in OVH or Hetzer within a few days. The primitives exist, the EU simply needs to lean into cultivating and supporting them (orgs, platforms, etc) to push EU entities consuming these services away from US Tech. Perhaps the tech stack is a national security interest, just as a manufacturing base and supply chain is. Better to be prepared than to be entrenched in the US Tech ecosystem and then suddenly be held hostage for reasons.

TheBlight• 1 year ago

The EU doesn't have a significant tech industry.

crimsoneer• 1 year ago

Hosting LLMs at scale without Azure/Bedrock is still a massive pain, and they offer EU based data sovereignty, so not clear what the problem is there (or are we now saying no doing business with US companies at all?)

newsclues• 1 year ago

Where are they going to get their power?

Russian gas? Suddenly build nuclear?

ojl• 1 year ago

Who are “they”? Several European countries have nuclear power (together with some other source as well of course) and are planning to build more. It will probably take a long time though.

amanaplanacanal• 1 year ago

Don't they still have North Sea oil?

radlad• 1 year ago

Isn't that what Russia already does?

znpy4• 1 year ago

I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry in Europe.

Unlikely.

I've worked at an american cloud provider and (in another job) i've worked with an european cloud provider (in this context, when I say "worked with" I mean i was in contact with the people actually managing the hardware as well as the software that serves the "cloud").

It's just a completely different mindset, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

The main issue i see is that european cloud providers mostly have technically-ignorant upper management for which providing a cloud offering essentially boils down to "buy this software component from company xyz (likely an american company) and install this open source product abc, then slap a cloud marketing name and unleash the salespeople". They can't even contemplate the idea hiring somebody with FAANG-level skills, paying it FAANG-level money and let it do FAANG-level work. They hire a few underpaid 20-somethings and have them manage, at best, an OpenStack installation.

I kid you not: in late 2021 i was in a meeting with (among the others) the head of cloud engineering of one such companies and asked when are they planning on offering ipv6 connectivity. The guy had a loud laugh and said they had no plans to even consider ipv6 connectivity. And that was at a company that does both "cloud" computing infrastructure and connectivity (!!!). That's the mindset.

I don't see europe building a realistic alternative to american cloud providers, and the core issue is not technical.

scarab925• 1 year ago

They also move too slowly, so they fall further and further behind each year.

For example, Hetzner has great potential, but they’re only just now releasing object storage after 4 years in the cloud space, and they don’t even have managed database yet.

belter5• 1 year ago

"AWS Services That Do Not Support IPv6" - https://github.com/DuckbillGroup/aws-ipv6-gaps

nisa• 1 year ago

The main issue i see is that european cloud providers mostly have technically-ignorant upper management for which providing a cloud offering essentially boils down to "buy this software component from company xyz (likely an american company) and install this open source product abc, then slap a cloud marketing name and unleash the salespeople". They can't even contemplate the idea hiring somebody with FAANG-level skills, paying it FAANG-level money and let it do FAANG-level work. They hire a few underpaid 20-somethings and have them manage, at best, an OpenStack installation.

Thank you! As a german that saw how the sauce is made in public sector tenders it's exactly this!

This is not restricted to hosting / cloud sector. It's a good summary for most german IT companies.

Arrogance and incompetence are rampant. Programmers and their managers need to go en masse to have some substantial change.

Everyone is so full of themselves and disconnected from reality it's scary.

amelius2• 1 year ago

Ok, that's one datapoint. Another datapoint says that Linux originated in Europe.

dennis_jeeves22• 1 year ago

I don't see europe building a realistic alternative to american cloud providers, and the core issue is not technical.

The brain drain ultimately takes it toll. The most capable people from europe ( and every where else), move to US , be they engineers, management, entrepreneurs etc.

Hikikomori3• 1 year ago

Ipv6 wasn't rally viable in a box until like last year.

whatever14• 1 year ago

Not only cloud, but the entire defense industry that was hibernating for the past 70 years, for you know good reasons.

All of these nice F35s made in USA, will soon have no buyers except the USA itself.

BoredPositron3• 1 year ago

Germany pretty much only ordered the F-35 to carry US nuclear weapons because their current platform (Tornado) is getting retired. They didn't want to hand over Typhoon schematics to retrofit it. They pretty much only had the choice between F18s or F35s.

nosianu• 1 year ago

That is very optimistic.

Given that for today's election here in Germany actual problems barely played a role. Not just that, over the last two decades very little was done. For example, we have skyrocketing rents due to a general lack of housing, which leads to all kinds of problems apart from affordability. For example worker mobility. Who dares to move to another job and city when it's so hard to find a flat?

That's par for the course for almost all big problems.

I think the probability is high that the new German government is going to try to sit this one out. After all, they survived Trump the last time, and it's only four years, right? Worse, they would have to do many things that will be very unpopular with one or the other interest group.

Unless somebody puts a gun to the heads of all those in government they will procrastinate rather than make any big changes.

I see little chance that they will cancel the order for US military hardware. They might actually buy a lot more, to appease Trump. After all, not getting the F-35 would have repercussions for the nuclear sharing agreement with the US. They need the F-35 to have a certified platform for nuclear bombs they are supposed to get from the US, stored in Germany for that purpose.

That would mean they would need a European approach to nuclear weapon sharing and weapons. The German government regularly has trouble even just to work together with only France, due to wildly different philosophies and interests.

Europe is far too divided, and the German government sees its role in doing as little as possible when it comes to radical change.

I think part of it is that the leadership of all our big parties mostly consists of politicians whose whole life is just that. They don't have anything else. Even if they get a job at a company it's for their political connections. They won't risk this, and they barely have any strong opinions! They look at polls and change what they stand for accordingly and easily. I'm not saying this to sound mean, I think that this is a mostly accurate description.

Opposing the US would take spine! It's a lot of trouble and uncertainty. They will try to avoid that if at all possible.

----------

By the way, it's not just F-35. Germany also ordered the Israeli-American Arrow 3 long-range missile defense system, sixty CH-47 Chinook, and 380 other contracts worth 23 billion just from the "Sondervermögen" (special fund) of 100 billion. Surely that will just become more, given that Germany continues to need to purchase things like Patriot missiles.

The strategy was - to the chagrin of the French if I understood the news articles written at the time right - to rather buy something proven and quickly available from the Americans rather than start a lengthy inter-European development process.

jandrewrogers4• 1 year ago

The F-35 is an extremely compelling and competitive product, with some unique forward-looking capabilities that are difficult to replicate. It was also built for export, both technically and politically, so many of the foreign buyers are more invested in it than they may otherwise be.

It is this generation's F-16, many thousands will be built and sold.

tbrownaw• 1 year ago

So we're about to finally get the year of Linux on the desktop?

qwerty4561272• 1 year ago

Almost every EU company I worked with, migrated from Windows to Ubuntu at some point.

mattmaroon• 1 year ago

It's been one year away for 30 years!

DaSHacka4• 1 year ago

More like "Year of the EU computing independence" this time, totally for real guys!

Workaccount2• 1 year ago

Linux will gain traction as soon as people have difficultly figuring out how to open a terminal window - by design. The main problem with linux, or specifically linux distros, is that they are designed and maintained by people who like using linux, which eternally damns it to ~5% market penetration.

petercooper3• 1 year ago

The EU hasn't even got a home-built social network with significant market reach, let alone the wherewithal to pull off ditching Microsoft and Google. It'd be nice to see that change, but there's surely some sort of blocker after 25 years of the Web being a mainstream technology.

toomuchtodo4• 1 year ago

There is an active effort currently to have the EU contribute towards funding https://freeourfeeds.com/ (to enable a distributed, global AT Proto network). Does the EU need the network to be home grown or have the valuation matter? I argue no, it is a utility, not a business to be captured and squeezed by investors or other potential controlling interests.

(as of this comment, Bluesky has ~32M users and counting)

bloomingkales4• 1 year ago

They can fork phpbb. You didn’t really think these social networks are anything more than that?

We just need to see if phpbb can scale to a billion, and if not, why not.

microtonal3• 1 year ago

The used to exist (e.g. Hyves, StudiVZ), but they are murdered by FAANG. However, there are still locally successful companies that could expand to the rest of Europe if US companies were dropped. E.g. just speaking of The Netherlands, Bol.com is much more popular than Amazon, Marktplaats is more popular than eBay (which is pretty much non-existent here) and owned by a Nordic company, etc., iDEAL is much more popular for payments than PayPal, Stripe, etc. (and works far better). Such companies can fill the void.

Microsoft will be tough to replace. There are good alternatives, but retraining personnel, etc. will take years. Google, I am not sure. Their cloud services are replaceable. Search may be tougher, but the quality of Google Search has become so bad that it's often easier to ask an LLM.

fsflover8• 1 year ago

PeerTube is made in France, Mastodon AFAIK in Germany.

Reventlov• 1 year ago

And that's why we need to stop being dependent on the US: everything in there is described in terms of « market share », and not in terms of usefulness, ethics, or independence.

ozim2• 1 year ago

With social networks or any EU startup problem is you have to deal with different languages right at the start.

Being US startup with English only you have access to 300m people right away.

There were country specific social networks but then all cool kids were on FB so everyone moved there.

The same with LinkedIn, our country specific business social network closed down finally last year. First 3-5 years it was growing then everyone moved to LinkedIn so that network was ghost town for 15 years someone kept it alive just in case but seems like they stopped wasting money.

psychoslave• 1 year ago

Maybe so called social network is not something to reproduce. Who cares who runs them if they deteriorate sociality, generate addictive consumption of things detrimental to mental health and favor extremists point of view?

hedora17• 1 year ago

Mastodon is German:

https://joinmastodon.org/about

(So is SAP, for that matter.)

presentation• 1 year ago

Too many trade barriers, stifling rules and general hostility to growing tech companies for the EU to compete with US companies, and only looks to get more restrictive. I’d bet against the EU pulling it off unless there’s a big coordinated realignment of priorities.

pton_xd• 1 year ago

I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry in Europe.

Have you tried using OVH? It's... not ready for prime time. Don't get me wrong, I love it for cheap EU servers, but man is it a pain in the ass to deal with.

dmix• 1 year ago

Europe is already pretty experienced in increasing their costs of doing business to avoid any sort of risk already so I’m sure they’ll figure something out.

cgcrob• 1 year ago

I think the impact is going to be far greater than that.

I have seen, at least here in the UK, some people speaking about moving entirely back to hardware that is controlled by the organisation. The case is there on a cost basis already but people are reluctant to admit this. If another magical guarantee expires such as a security one, then the reason can be shifted to that and the cost justification is collateral.

Getting out of PaaS systems is going to be horrible and expensive though. We never should have gone further than IaaS.

I suspect the idea of the cloud as it stands today may die fairly quickly.

paganel• 1 year ago

Maybe of the "liberal" Europeans techies are commenting on this American website and complaining about how bad America is, apparently with no self-awareness and how European governments and not only should boycott American stuff. The same goes for commenting the same thing on American website Reddit.

jaybrendansmith• 1 year ago

Europe has done this before. Airbus did not exist but now it is the best aircraft maker since Boeing decided to retire all their senior engineers in favor of quick profits. Europe created Airbus, they can do the same with a new Cloud provider.

layer82• 1 year ago

This presumes that today’s Europe is comparable to the one ca. 60 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Airbus#1970%E2%80...

(I’m not disputing the chances, just the logic of the analogy with Airbus.)

_DeadFred_3• 1 year ago

Don't forget Boeing moved their headquarters and leadership to DC. Making the widgets is just the inconvenient part management doesn't really care about/need to be involved with, the focus worthy part of their business is government extraction in Boeing corporate's minds. Our corporate class is such short sigted trash.

kichimi• 1 year ago

They can do even better. I don't know how much I can say but there is an EU funded alternative in the works.

Hikikomori3• 1 year ago

Evroc in Sweden is trying to do this.

odiroot2• 1 year ago

On the other hand, many of us in Europe still have the memories (or our parents tales) of our governments spying on everything we say and do. With all the chilling consequences.

Half a century of communist rule showed us not to trust our governments.

Every now and then, the Brussels bureaucrats show us how much do they value our privacy and electronic safety.

hedora17• 1 year ago

The US govt would never do that.

qwerty4561272• 1 year ago

If I was in Europe, I would never use any US Tech products.

Could you possibly name any specific riscs?

Xenoamorphous3• 1 year ago

Trump.

PessimalDecimal• 1 year ago

Some specific RISCs: RISC-V, MIPS, ARM, POWER, PowerPC.

Xenoamorphous3• 1 year ago

Not just cloud but military and many other things.

I think MAGA is good for Europe, there’s a big incentive to remove any kind of US dependency.

CooCooCaCha• 1 year ago

That's the problem with adversarial competition instead of collaboration. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you think the other entity is a shark, then your going to start acting like a shark too in order to protect yourself.

tensor2• 1 year ago

There is already a decent cloud industry in Europe. OVH has been around for decades, and many companies in North America even use them because they are often a bit cheaper. But you also have newer players like Scaleway and CDNs like Bunney.net that are growing fast.

I think the harder services to replace are things like Github and O365/Google Workplace.

matt-p11• 1 year ago

Are OVH decent? I'm not entirely sure that they're even passable and what other options would you have in Europe?

aerhardt2• 1 year ago

"Cloud" is not boxes like OVH and Hetzner sell. Cloud is a gigantic software layer offering all kinds of features and abstractions.

I think it'd be faster and cheaper to replicate GitHub or even Office, which are complex but fairly feature-stable, than to offer a real cloud competitor with a fraction of the services that Amazon, Microsoft or Google offer in their cloud portfolios.

I heard an interesting thought on the Lex Friedman podcast though. If software engineering really becomes cheaper and more readily available thanks to AI, maybe more companies will start building more of their own services. Then, maybe then, will the European enterprise be able to wean itself off from the big cloud vendors.

rahkiin• 1 year ago

How does Scaleway measure up these days?

Are there good resources for comparing clouds with sovereignty in mind?

docmars2• 1 year ago

As intended. European independence and sovereignty would be a great outcome from all this.

bittermandel2• 1 year ago

Definitely is, it triggered us at Molnett, Clever Cloud, Safespring and others to start believing in competing with the hyperscalers!

templeOSdotcom2• 1 year ago

I am all for more European development. It seems like the EU makes it harder to build anything-- from what I've read I should say.

bbqfog16• 1 year ago

Every government and big company spies on you. If you don't host your own hardware, you should expect that. If you do host your own hardware, you're still vulnerable to things like Mossad spyware. None of this is new, and Europe is as guilty if not more guilty than anyone at this state of affairs.

Loughla2• 1 year ago

I think the difference is that you would rather take your chances that your own system gets compromised by Mossad, which you can't really do anything about, than willingly hand over your information to a country that is increasingly hostile?

bbqfog16• 1 year ago

Like you said, the truly hostile entities will gain access anyway. The people breaking into the systems to gain access are the ones you really need to be worried about. I'm pretty sure the US government has that capability if it wants it (not that I endorse it, I don't).

this_user• 1 year ago

That has been obvious since 2013 at least.

ReptileMan• 1 year ago

It never was

pclmulqdq2• 1 year ago

It was never safe for any government to move any secrets to any cloud. The fact that the US government is okay with doing this with its own secrets surprises me to this day. You have no secrets from the person who owns your hardware.

rcpt2• 1 year ago

Security isn't a "safe" vs. "not safe" bool

dmantis2• 1 year ago

The world literally has hard proofs of mass espionage by the NSA and CIA after Snowden and Wikileaks Vault 7. Moving your government secrets to the US cloud has been madness for at least 12 years.

dijit4• 1 year ago

Correct, it's more like a bitmask.

Except if any of the bits are flipped you're f-d; especially so if your adversary is a nation.

im_down_w_otp3• 1 year ago

I guess so, but based on current events, it doesn't seem like the US Govt. has any secrets that it places any value on. Between a bunch of glorified interns being given access to anything & everything and a bunch of known compromised department heads being appointed... it doesn't strike me that the US Govt. takes its national security very seriously at all.

The US Govt. seems empirically much more vested in what goes on in public restrooms than it does in what goes on in global affairs and military conflicts.

danaris• 1 year ago

[flagged]

DaSHacka4• 1 year ago

The sheer number of flagged replies to this comment is telling.

closeparen• 1 year ago

The US government’s secrets are routinely held and processed by contractors. The prototypical government secret is something like the plans of an airplane designed and manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

zombiwoof2• 1 year ago

Elon Musk will have access to all data.

That should scare everyone given his propaganda machinery aimed at elections he does or doesn’t like

jandrewrogers4• 1 year ago

It isn't uniform by any means but the US runs on a physically independent cloud, often in their own facilities, designed by the big cloud companies. When using the public cloud for unclassified work (e.g. working with outside vendors), the data is only allowed to reside in specific data centers that have been vetted by the government, not all US regions have the same authorization. For example, government data in an S3 bucket in the public cloud may only be accessed and processed within the same region, which can be annoying if your infrastructure is elsewhere.

The US is far ahead of most countries when it comes to government use of the cloud. Other developed countries often learn how to do it from the US but are less comfortable with the technical requirements, which slows down adoption.

dataflow• 1 year ago

Physical isolation is kind of irrelevant for the concerns being voiced here no? It's not like Europe's main worry is random people walking in and yanking hard disks out of servers in datacenters.

KennyBlanken• 1 year ago

Other developed countries are less comfortable because all the major cloud providers are US-owned companies and the NSA has a very, very long history of using US companies as information security weapons.

Not that they're the only ones. Israel has been busy stuffing investment cash into the pockets of Unit 8200 members so they can found security software and service startups coughSnykcough

vimbtw• 1 year ago

This is a great point. For example, near where I live there’s a massive Google cloud warehouse out in the middle of a field next to the highway. Inside of that warehouse there’s a separate section for servers belonging to the US government that can benefit from all the electricity contracts Google has negotiated, the physical security and fences that Google has set up, and the fiber optic cables they’ve laid.

It’s the best of both worlds, they get the decades of research Google has put into systems engineering and fault tolerance while retaining the security of having their own servers.

radicalbyte3• 1 year ago

It's not the technology, it's the US Cloud Act which has slowed a lot of it down.

Very few actually qualified and capable techies here trust any of the US-based cloud providers.

tremon• 1 year ago

Same for the German cloud, it's Azure Stack but operated by a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom IIRC.

dangus• 1 year ago

Isn't this just kind of willfully ignorant to the way the government cloud works?

GovCloud claims that it's used to "manage sensitive data and controlled unclassified information (CUI)."

I don't think the US government is dumping classified info onto corporate cloud environments judging by this description from GovCloud. But there's plenty of info that's sensitive but unclassified and the government does need to function in a lot of ways that doesn't involve state secrets.

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ for more of a description of what GovCloud actually is.

thesuperbigfrog• 1 year ago

> I don't think the US government is dumping classified info onto corporate cloud environments judging by this description from GovCloud.

There are cloud environments specifically for classified info:

https://aws.amazon.com/federal/secret-cloud/

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/coreinfrastructurea...

dcrazy• 1 year ago

“Secrets” is a broad term that covers everything from payroll information to the history of CIA clandestine operations. Only some kinds of these are stored in the cloud.

rapatel0• 1 year ago

The US Gov't has their own GOV Cloud Datacenter Regions. It's run by azure and AWS but there are restrictions on who is allowed to use it. It's not really public

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/?whats-new.sort-by=item.a...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-government/doc...

ocdtrekkie• 1 year ago

The point is Amazon and Microsoft surely have vested interests in government data they are not supposed to be privy to.

locusofself• 1 year ago

The 4 major cloud vendors (Azure, AWS, GCP and Oracle) all have Air-gapped regions in addition to their "GovCloud" regions.

whimsicalism7• 1 year ago

you can obviously have secrets from someone who holds your ssd, that is the whole point of encryption.

TechDebtDevin2• 1 year ago

Thats not fool proof what so ever.

ncallaway2• 1 year ago

I feel like you've narrowed the original statement ("You have no secrets from the person who owns your hardware") when you scope it to just data storage at rest. I take hardware to mean significantly more than just at rest data storage in the context that it was used.

If your unencrypted data flows through any AWS memory or compute, or if your encryption key flows through any AWS memory or compute, then AWS *can* access that data.

jiveturkey• 1 year ago

There are secrets and then there are secrets.

For the former, confidential compute is far enough along that this data can in fact be secret from the hardware owner. This is vital even for on-prem hardware -- IT folks and techs with physical access shouldn't have access simply due to proximity.

For the latter, sure, but this is very expensive. It goes well beyond owning the hardware.

breadwinner5• 1 year ago

You have no secrets from the person who owns your hardware.

What if the hardware is physically located in your own country, and employees of cloud vendor are virtually "accompanied", and watched, any time they login to the hardware? That's called sovereign cloud and all cloud vendors have it.

tpm• 1 year ago

But the long hand of US law reaches even there if it is owned by an US company.

ivanmontillam3• 1 year ago

Yes, I agree.

I make the parallel with "gold." Whoever has your gold, got you by the hanging spheres.

Given the importance of data today, I am baffled common citizens are not familiar with the "Data at rest" principle.

zhengiszen2• 1 year ago

Nice comparison

cscurmudgeon2• 1 year ago

So the US is within its rights to ban TikTok?

jviotti• 1 year ago

I think this is the key. It is cheaper and more convenient than ever to deploy and manage data critical services yourself, in a self hosted manner that is protected by whatever jurisdiction you are in. What matters is not who builds it, but who has access to the data, and ideally, that's only you!

cogman10• 1 year ago

This does raise a valid question of what secrets can or should the government have.

I think it's obvious that some secrets should be kept. It makes little sense to expose our nuclear secrets, counter espionage, or ongoing investigation efforts. But how far does or should that extend? Should everything the NSA/CIA/FBI/IRS does be secret? Should they stay secret for years or decades or forever?

IMO, the US goes too far in it's secrets. Stuff gets classified that just makes the government look bad and that's dangerous.

And that's where I'm somewhat less concerned about putting US secrets into the cloud. Sure there's highly sensitive stuff that shouldn't go there, but there's also a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been a secret in the first place.

Andrex• 1 year ago

FOIA makes the US gov't one of the more transparent democracies, as a counterpoint. So much so it started getting copied by them.

https://reason.com/2024/12/26/foia-for-all/

thelamest• 1 year ago

“Transparency” as leaks from abuse is very, very different from transparency as a policy of easy access – and neither makes you necessarily better informed. In short, a biased selection of information can leave you worse off than having no information.

GeoAtreides• 1 year ago

pretty sure my remote encrypted backups[1] can keep a secret or two from the cloud storage provider

[1]https://rclone.org/crypt/

riffic• 1 year ago

That's not necessarily true if you use the appropriate tools and controls to safeguard data. Further, "any cloud" is a sweeping generalization and not all clouds are created equal. You raise valid concerns about trusting third-party hardware BUT.. come on, ease up on the alarmism.

To elaborate: robust encryption, dedicated hardware security modules (HSMs), and sophisticated key management safeguards data even if it resides on someone elses hardware.

If you design your system properly, even if the cloud provider manages the underlying hardware, your secrets remain secure because the keys and sensitive data are protected in a controlled, isolated environment.

aiono• 1 year ago

The US government is okay basically because people who own cloud platforms are part of the government.

rsync2• 1 year ago

I disagree.

Why would encrypted data, which the provider holds no keys to, be a dangerous way For a government to hold a secret?

jjav• 1 year ago

The fact that the US government is okay with doing this with its own secrets surprises me to this day.

This fact conveys information. Namely, how tightly bound these supposedly independent services like AW GovCloud are with the government itself.

Which also tells us how much direct access the government has to all the AWS (and all other providers) infrastructure.

milesward• 1 year ago

I'd guess a reasonable start at delivering near-equivalent capabilities, capacity, and reliability from a standing start today, in just Europe, to be about €50b. The shopping list isn't all that tough. Who wants to pony up?

jeffrallen2• 1 year ago

European cloud providers already exist, and companies from industries and countries where data protection is regulated are already happy clients (see Swiss FINMA, and German governments required by law to carefully respect GDPR).

Maybe an influx of business will make us grow the European clouds, but that's ok, we're up to it.

everfrustrated5• 1 year ago

I'd argue that there are actually no EU cloud providers. There are only EU hosting providers.

graemep6• 1 year ago

Its never been a good idea. I do not think non-EU European countries can rely on EU cloud, not can EU countries can necessarily rely on each other.

The only effect the distrust of the current US government will have is a few articles. It expensive and difficult for this to be sufficient incentive to change anything.

We should probably grateful they have not put it all on Chinese clouds.

watwut8• 1 year ago

America is literally allying itself with Russia, trying to turn Ukraine into basically colony (by demanding their resources forever), threatening annexation of Canada (repeatedly). Oh, and in the process of starting a trade war.

Non-EU can trust EU waaay more then anyone except Russia can trust to America. American leadership made it clear that norms, laws or morality are only for suckers.

The levels of behaviors between the sides here are not symmetrical

whimsicalism7• 1 year ago

EU also demands resources in exchange for military support such as the French+UK-led intervention into Libya. Saying US is an ally of Russia is a pretty big stretch, meanwhile the EU has members that are actually allied with Russia and lots of large Russia-aligned multinationals like Gunvor

rdtsc3• 1 year ago

America is literally allying itself with Russia, trying to turn Ukraine into basically colony (by demanding their resources forever)

It was Ukraine/Zelensky who suggested that first not Trump. It was back in November. But we tend to forget such things for some reason...

From https://www.ft.com/content/623c197f-6952-4229-bfbc-0a96e43d6...

Two of the ideas were laid out in Volodymyr Zelensky’s “victory plan” with Trump specifically in mind, said people involved in drawing it up. The proposals were later presented to Trump when Ukraine’s president met him in New York in September.

So Trump agreed eventually and then Zelensky started a media storm about how Trump wants take their natural resources and turn them into a colony. And everyone somehow immediately forgot that the proposal originated with Ukranian government.

The levels of behaviors between the sides here are not symmetrical

It comes from a fundamentally different perceptions of reality and politics. There is idea that things have to be just and fair. And when they are not we like to say "it's not fair" and someone comes and fixes it. I am afraid it just doesn't work like that past the childhood age.

American leadership made it clear that norms, laws or morality are only for suckers.

When weren't they? You're thinking maybe everyone just finally woke up? Morality and laws do not apply in practice on the international arena. It would be nice if they did, I agree, but they don't currently.

EU should have always had it's own strong army, it should have never trusted the US and not relied on them for protection. But they also shouldn't have been buying energy from Putin and funding his operation for years.

Axsuul4• 1 year ago

It's a bit premature to call it an alliance. So far there have only been talks.

trying to turn Ukraine into basically colony (by demanding their resources forever)

Keep in mind it was Ukraine that proposed the idea of offering their resources back in October 2024[0]

0. https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/zelenskyys-victory-plan-ukr...

altacc• 1 year ago

I work at an large Europe based multi-national and hosting has always been a concern due to the big differences in data protection and privacy rules. We never use a service not hosted in the EEA.

The current threats that the US is making to Europe about it's data protection, privacy, consumer protection, etc... laws is very much of concern and is already beginning to be a factor in our ongoing RFPs and procurement process. We're not just following the law, we also don't trust some companies with our reputation.

graemep6• 1 year ago

A lot of European companies and organisations use services provided by American companies but run on servers in Europe. In the UK the NHS uses AWS, the courts use MS teams, etc.

ekianjo• 1 year ago

It was never safe in the first place and only a fool could be convinced of that. Keep your data locally as much as you can.

mrits2• 1 year ago

It's interesting to me that the reaction of Europe is to start taking their security more seriously. While I'm never sure the though process of a certain individual I do know this was the point of the conservative party in the US

nobankai3• 1 year ago

I do know this was the point of the conservative party in the US

No incumbent president, democrat or republican, has ever meaningfully restricted America's digital surveillance capabilities. Backdooring domestic hardware for the sake of "national security" is a bipartisan effort in America.

znpy4• 1 year ago

Seconding this, iirc at the time when Edward Snowden started leaking documents Barack Obama was president and I don't remember any effort from him to restrict USA's surveillance capabilities.

mrits2• 1 year ago

I don't disagree with that but don't see how it is relevant. Spying on yourself is a different issue

quotemstr• 1 year ago

This is rich considering the UK just a few weeks ago jawboning Apple into making user data visible to the state.

bbqfog16• 1 year ago

Indeed. GDPR, cookie laws, draconian anti-free speech content policies. I'm not a fan at all of the US government but Europe has proven to be the last place on earth you want to host something.

Tanjreeve4• 1 year ago

If your "tech innovation" isn't capable of restricting child pornography and calls for terrorism and genocide maybe it's not 100% a loss for everyone else?

PhilipRoman• 1 year ago

one of these things is not like the others

everfrustrated5• 1 year ago

The US has DCMA and strong free speech protections.

There is no free speech protection in any EU country.

DCMA is overlooked but it's hugely beneficial for US companies and means they're not liable for what their users publish/write on their site. In Europe you have to staff moderation teams to remove defamatory content etc or become liable to be sued yourself.

ako5• 1 year ago

There is free speech in Europe, just not free lies. I think it’s a good thing if voter manipulation through Russian lies is addressed, this is just a piece of online warfare from Russia.

scambier• 1 year ago

Is the UK still considered "European"?

com2• 1 year ago

Only geographically. For many other attributes, accelerating away at speed.

nadir_ishiguro2• 1 year ago

By the rest of Europe? Kinda.

They always seem to have imagined themselves to sit halfway across the Atlantic instead of a few miles off the French coast.

ArtTimeInvestor3• 1 year ago

Ok.

And how about making every citizen constantly carry an always-on device from the USA full of sensors and permanent internet access?

And how about basing all infrastructure on these devices, so that nothing works without them?

And how about not letting a software ecosystem flurish, so that when robots (cars, humanoid robots, weapons ...) take over, all of them will be controlled by US software?

darkest_ruby• 1 year ago

Nobody forced you to buy an iPhone, an android alternative has always existed

ArtTimeInvestor3• 1 year ago

No matter if you use iPhone or Android - in both cases a US company has full control over it.

graemep6• 1 year ago

So a different American company?

Lyngbakr• 1 year ago

Unless you're using Graphene or similar, you're still plugged into a US corporation when using Android.

bigfudge• 1 year ago

This is such a bad argument, because for a functional modern smartphone (for non nerds) you need to get into bed with either Apple or Google.

The way out of this is not expecting consumers to install fdroid. It’s putting in place proper regulations to preserve privacy and security for EI societies.

everdrive• 1 year ago

Android devices run a Google OS and report data to Google. Apple's privacy claims are not actually impressive when inspected, however Android is far, far worse when it comes to privacy violations. It doesn't really matter than the phone itself might be manufactured by a 3rd party. In fact, it could be worse; your data could be excessively leaked to both Samsung and Google, rather than merely Google.

croes10• 1 year ago

That comes on top

beng-nl• 1 year ago

You’re not wrong, but your point doesn’t diminish the point of the post.

Maybe we should discuss one topic at a time so we can make progress somewhere without the implication that progress that isn’t everywhere is progress nowhere?

piskov• 1 year ago

All this doesn't mean your back-end should be based on something like Microsoft Windows Server with MS Sql Server. Or modern equivalent of serverless Windows Azure.

Russians (and everyone closely watching) started that transition almost painlessly in 2014.

Have your own search engine. Have your own payment system. Base your infrastructure on open-source.

You know, be sovereign, not dependent.

The users switching from iOS to Android is just the last mile.

ArtTimeInvestor3• 1 year ago

That would require banning US services. As the European industry (held down by bureaucracy) does not stand a chance to build solutions that can compete.

It seems like this is not on the horizon yet. And in the times of AI, it would probably result in a huge productivity hit.

bob1029• 1 year ago

All this doesn't mean your back-end should be based on something like Microsoft Windows Server with MS Sql Server.

Why the hell not?

From a technology perspective (i.e., data/information theory/performance/what HN should be about), MSSQL is really, really hard to beat in a big enterprise ecosystem. This isn't because of decades of prerequisite evil dealings that make it a morally incompatible offering, but because it's been so thoroughly exposed to every possible use case that yours would certainly flow nicely.

I've been watching a lot of otherwise really compelling ideas and high energy teams get turned into complete shit due to these ideologies. I can understand a EU tech startup being hesitant toward US-based technology, but in 99% of the cases I hear about, it's a purely American tech company with zero international presence that is making a bunch of noise about how much they hate whatever domestic/paid/"closed" offerings.

fsflover8• 1 year ago

The users switching from iOS to Android

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS (therecord.media)

816 points by gormandizer on March 30, 2021 | 445 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

mmaunder• 1 year ago

And then fund a lot of talking instead of a lot of doing.

fsflover8• 1 year ago

making every citizen constantly carry an always-on device from the USA full of sensors and permanent internet access

I hope it gives at least some boost to GNU/Linux phones. Librem 5 is my daily driver, and it feels amazing despite its drawbacks.

'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised (theguardian.com)

676 points by zeristor 1 day ago | 784 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137488

anonymousiam• 1 year ago

If you believe that the USA has the only government that wants to surveil its citizens, then you should open your eyes. The US possibly has more restrictions on directly surveilling its own citizens (within the US) than any other country.

That pesky Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights keeps getting in their way, so they've created ways around it, such as allowing allied nations to do the surveillance for them.

Every government in the world has mandates that require a surveillance capability. This has been the reason that satellite constellations cannot route traffic directly from user-to-user, but instead must route through "hubs", at a cost of doubling the required, but precious bandwidth.

mrweasel• 1 year ago

And how about making every citizen constantly carry an always-on device from the USA

Screw that, every EU politician have an iPhone or Android phone, loaded with apps from Meta, X, Tiktok and what have you. Step one should be for our politicians to put some sort of emphasis on their own privacy in relationship to the US, Russia and China.

amelius2• 1 year ago

This is going to hurt as we will all have to hand in our iPhones then.

davidw• 1 year ago

"Free trade is good, actually" where different places can focus on doing what they do best and trade for other goods and services.

But you have to have reasonably sane trading partners for that to work and that has gone out the window.

And yeah, it's going to hurt a lot of people.

assimpleaspossi• 1 year ago

The only thing that changed is hearsay and inuendo which this post is based on.

aravindputrevu• 1 year ago

People have always thoightabputitand said no to cloud. Especially those folks who are non-native tech businesses

matt-p11• 1 year ago

The main problem to my mind is that we have none. OVH are perhaps the only semi serious option and that's super depressing.

everfrustrated5• 1 year ago

As someone who been using US clouds for over 10 years now, I was looking in the state of EU clouds recently.

It's like going back in time 15 years.

OVH co-mingling postgres customers on the same underlying server with no noisy-neighbour protections! AWS RDS is obsolete tech these days and they can't even match that!

matt-p11• 1 year ago

Yes, I know. I wouldn't really want to use OVH for anything besides bare metal, same for hetzner (even then, they're not great at it).

The only good providers I'd use again are London based.

nicce• 1 year ago

Did you check Scaleway as well?

hinkley5• 1 year ago

OVH, who burned down a data center because it didn’t have fire suppression. Never forget.

maelito2• 1 year ago

Using Scaleway. It's great. Lots of open source stacks too.

preisschild2• 1 year ago

If you just need compute, Hetzner is pretty good too. But recently they have been having capacity problems. Most server types are sold out.

sam_lowry_7• 1 year ago

I wonder why )

morkalork2• 1 year ago

Time for Ericsson to resurrect their phone division?

sylware• 1 year ago

How to say this... it was not in the first place. And it is not specific to the US, it is the external cloud operator which is the issue.

It is a very complex matter. Roughly speaking, if you rely a lot on information systems, in the end you are own by the real operators of those information systems.

nonrandomstring• 1 year ago

I think "international cyber-relations" is something that's more generally coming into mainstream attention [0], whereas it's always been a bit muted and behind the scenes because people never questioned where the Internet is. Another factor moving attention back to geography is energy. We started caring about what "the cloud" costs the planet. The magic of "The Cloud/Internet" was to make location disappear. Now, who has your data is an issue again. Clearly the Danes are not on BFF terms with US at the moment. Here in the UK our problem is GCHQ using a lot of AWS. I've no doubt current US politics will lead to big changes in how computing and storage is structured. Maybe we'll get some good new protocols and practices (I'm thinking of real massively distributed systems) out of this which make things more resilient and less parochial for everyone.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=31

miki1232112• 1 year ago

And this will be felt on both sides of the pond.

Unlike most other developed countries, the US has no real site blocking, mostly because it doesn't need it. They have enough control over the financial system and enough friends in foreign governments that they can essentially nuke websites that don't follow American law off the face of the earth, or at least force them not to serve American users of their own "free will". See e.g. crypto exchanges that don't follow KYC/AML, crypto-native prediction markets that nevertheless require a VPN for Americans to access, despite not even interacting with the non-crypto financial system, piracy sites which are often shut down at the behest of the US government, foreign banks that ask you whether you're a US citizen etc.

Once the answer to "we are the SEC, you can't let Americans visit your site or we'll get you extradited" changes from "yessir" to "fuck off, we're Europeans who have never stepped foot in the US, American law doesn't apply to us, and our government is gonna back us up on that", things will get really interesting.

As a European who is very much against EU tech regulations and the EU way of doing tech generally, this is definitely one change I'll welcome with open arms.

As an aside, I'm surprised "freely offering drugs / pirated content / havala-style unregulated P2P crypto exchanges to Americans on the open internet" isn't a model that a US-unfriendly nation has tried so far.

TheCapeGreek• 1 year ago

foreign banks that ask you whether you're a US citizen

Note that this is largely the case for any bank where you're not a native to their country - because of the Common Reporting Standard. However the US asymmetrically applies FATCA instead of the CRS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Reporting_Standard#Mult...

"The U.S. receives information relating to US citizens' accounts from many countries due to the compliance requirements of the FATCA. The United States, in many cases, will reciprocate by sharing banking data with countries for accounts which their citizens hold in the U.S., but not automatically, as is required by the U.S. in FATCA."

This makes serving US citizens in an "average" financial institution an added burden that might not be considered worth the cost.

belter5• 1 year ago

European alternatives for digital products: https://european-alternatives.eu/

https://www.scaleway.com/en/

EuroStack: https://euro-stack.eu/

https://www.ceps.eu/a-bold-proposal-to-build-the-eurostack-b...

seqizz• 1 year ago

I recently got a message on LinkedIn from an AWS headhunter for: "Position for European Sovereign Cloud".

So I assume most of the mentioned issues will be irrelevant soon™. Because a) the convenience, b) lack of actual competitors.

hedora17• 1 year ago

The Cloud Act means that product offering is either violating US law or snake oil.

lynx97• 1 year ago

I never was. Claiming otherwise is blatant political propaganda.

mraniki• 1 year ago

https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to

midasz3• 1 year ago

Yeah, this just seems like a great opportunity for a European startup scene. Even though plenty of bad things happened under Joe Biden - the relationship with the US was fine. Every morning you wake up to see crazy stuff Trump said and that really plants a seed.

braebo• 1 year ago

I feel like I was unplugged. Among the most notable bad things that you witnessed the past 4 years, what in particular comes to mind when you think about it?

seydor• 1 year ago

The US army and NATO where the first global cloud services

827a3• 1 year ago

The UK government just demanded Apple to disable Advanced Data Protection, globally, in order to backdoor the iPhone; and Apple has at least compiled with it for UK users; but no, for sure, its the US Clouds that are unsafe, not because of specific laws or executive orders, but just... vibes. "The vibes are off, we're done" get real.

Romania just annulled a democratic election because of supposed interference from Russia. Some would say that by doing so Russia won anyway, but democracy doesn't seem to be a priority for some European countries. But, sure: Its the United States that presents the greatest danger.

com2• 1 year ago

Only one half of your comment is true.

Election interference does occur, and to protect democracy, courts must act where there is clear evidence.

Or are you referring to Hungary in your second paragraph?

827a3• 1 year ago

No; Romania [1]. But yes, Hungary also has its own set of problems; Europe has always been allergic to democracy, and its no surprise that allergy would keep rearing its head in the 21st century.

[1] https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-cancelled-elections-and-the-main...

kypro• 1 year ago

I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this reasoning, if it wasn't for the fact they only get involved when it's Russia trying to push the election in a certain direction.

There's countless examples of countries trying to influence the elections of others. I'm from the UK and a notable example that comes up here was when the US president threatened Brits that the UK would be put on the bottom of the list of trade talks if they voted Brexit.

And just recently nearly 100 staff from the UK government were supporting Harris in the US presidential election.

I'd also argue that propagating this idea that people are too stupid to see through the lies and interference in an election undermines the point of democracy. If we cannot trust people to make sound democratic decisions, then why do we even support democracy as a political system? In a democracy sometimes people will be misled. You need to trust that people will ultimately make the right decisions.

blackeyeblitzar4• 1 year ago

People discussing ideas freely on social media isn’t “election interference”.

kakoni• 1 year ago

Ukraine moved their governmental data into AWS in the start of war [1].

[1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/institute/AWS-Institute-Accelerate-...

bloopernova2• 1 year ago

I'm in the process of moving my various google data onto Hetzner storage share[1]. It's a Nextcloud instance with 5TB of storage for $16/month. My wife and I each have a normal user, we can share stuff just as well as before, and we can install things like a simple Kanban app, sync to our Android phones, etc etc.

So far it's been great, I highly recommend it.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/

k8sToGo2• 1 year ago

Regardless of any cloud:

I hope you have a proper backup strategy

bloopernova2• 1 year ago

Multiple local copies, a cloud copy, and an archive copy on a different provider.

k8sToGo2• 1 year ago

Interesting that I got down voted for this

jacooper• 1 year ago

It's only an option, if you trust hetzner, since there no encryption whatsoever, it's just a managed nextcloud instance.

lazzlazzlazz3• 1 year ago

I have been banned from Hetzner multiple times now and believe me, nothing I was doing is even strange, let alone worthy of bans. I don't think an EU cloud can ever be trusted.

masijo• 1 year ago

As a third worlder, this is hilarious. I'm sorry but I can't help but laugh at the panic some people are manifesting over the US no longer being the world police and involving itself militarily in another continent.

I don't like Trump, I really don't, but I hope he continues with this. Sadly he probably won't do the same with Israel though.

watwut8• 1 year ago

US is involving itself. They arw actively supporting Russia and actively threatening Canada.

USA is not stepping back, they are acting like an aggressor both against Ukraine and Canada. And against EU those somewhat less so.

throwaway_12321• 1 year ago

EU people calling US unreliable now? For the last 50 years EU has been doing to Israel what US is doing to EU... Sadly for you, the West will figure itself out.

rwyinuse5• 1 year ago

The US no longer playing world police isn't what's disturbing, it's understandable that they want EU to take care of its defense. The disturbing thing is how the current administration blamed Ukraine for the war, sees Putin's Russia as an ally, and actively wants to destabilize EU by supporting pro-Russian forces inside it.

All this is not so hilarious for me, living next to Russia and wondering if they will invade us within next 5-10 years, and whether we will receive any help from abroad when Europe seems to become increasingly pro-Russian. What is happening now is potentially a matter of life and death to us.

rdm_blackhole4• 1 year ago

The US no longer playing world police isn't what's disturbing, it's understandable that they want EU to take care of its defense.

I guess this reality has never reached the leaders of the EU apparently. Trump was in power before and also threatened to leave NATO yet the EU countries did not prepare for this at all. They had 4 years of Biden to do so but alas they simply waited and wasted time.

The disturbing thing is how the current administration blamed Ukraine for the war, sees Putin's Russia as an ally, and actively wants to destabilize EU by supporting pro-Russian forces inside it.

You find it disturbing because you are missing the forest for the trees.

China is now very tightly coupled with Russia and Iran. The biggest threat to US hegemony is not Russia, not by a mile. China has the means, the power and the will to start asserting itself on the global stage. On the other hand Russia struggles to hold on to a 5th of Ukraine.

Trump wants to split Russia away from China and is willing to give up on Ukraine in order to make this happen. It's that simple. Russia has huge swaths of raw minerals, fossil fuels, lumber and so on that China needs in order to expand it's economy therefore it makes complete sense to try to slide a wedge between them in order to isolate China.

In this game of Geo-politics, Ukraine and the EU are just pawns that can be traded/pushed around because they have barely any weight in the global order.

You can be mad about this but if you do you should be mad towards the EU leaders from the last 30 years who instead of building a robust industrial base, sent all their jobs abroad, who instead of building a army that could resist an invasion, relied on the US protection without even reaching the minimum NATO investment threshold year after year.

The EU countries made their bed and now they are struggling because most of them are broke, their economies are in the gutter and are slowly crumbling.

All this is not so hilarious for me, living next to Russia and wondering if they will invade us within next 5-10 years, and whether we will receive any help from abroad when Europe seems to become increasingly pro-Russian. What is happening now is potentially a matter of life and death to us.

This is a weird take. On one hand Russia, is not even able to conquer the whole of Ukraine but somehow it has the capability to steamroll over all the Baltic states? So which one is it, is Russia a paper tiger or an unstoppable force?

Both can't be true at the same time.

hedora17• 1 year ago

So, you’re hoping for more US backed genocide and ethnic cleansing campaigns, and less defending third parties when dictators decide to invade them?

How do you envision this playing out in your corner of the third world?

raverbashing3• 1 year ago

I think the biggest impediment here is binary thinking, which permeates a lot of this dialog

Sure, I agree with the article. Sure, the EU is way behind here in implementation, and the privacy stuff takes (IMHO) a bit of an absolutist position. But then we ask ourselves, how many people do actually turn down cookie banners (well I do, but still)

As a start, not even the US gov trusts their vendors, that's why there's FedRamp and such. It's a detailed procedural and deep certification.

Is it safe to have your stuff in a US cloud vendor? Well, which stuff? Is it safe to have it in a server under your desk? Probably less safe in the end

Which countries have actual specialists in securing data? (hey didn't the USDS just get shut down?) Which countries actually implement those security guidelines? (Or just general best practices?)

tl;dr: SNAFU

aranelsurion2• 1 year ago

how many people do actually turn down cookie banners (well I do, but still)

does anyone know why EU hasn't regulated (read: forced) use of DNT headers or a similar mechanism instead of non-standard cookie banners that are obviously being abused in a malicious compliance way?

Seems to me it could've been just "If I send you `DNT: 1`, that means refuse all non-functional cookies".

raverbashing3• 1 year ago

But see, whenever the EU prescribes a specific technical solution there's endless whining about how they're "locking themselves in" even if there's a path to evolution in the regulation (see the unified charger ruling)

But sure, they could have specified something to the effect of "if a browser specifies (though current technical means) that the user is DNT they should follow that" but there was lobbying from the advertisers and other parties as well

niemandhier• 1 year ago

European cloud providers can only exist in niches at the moment: - cheap but unreliable -> hetzner - integrated into the DFN -> gwdg - and so on

The market is captured by us companies. I doubt that this will change.

The reason is simply that the the number of clients that care for the problems described is small compared to the total market. If you run a company that caters to these clients, you will cater to a small market with special requirements.

Companies like that tend to be pricy and hence won’t take market share from Americans.

rmu092• 1 year ago

OTOH most of the stuff these cloud services run won't be really missed if gone.

midasz3• 1 year ago

Change can be spurred on by law. If governments aren't allowed to use non-EU (or maybe specifically US) hosters a big enough investment could jumpstart it. I'm working for a semi-government organization who just switched over to kubernetes. That can be hosted anywhere, there's not really a moat.

chriscjcj• 1 year ago

Not only is it a terrible idea given the kind of things the “King of America” keeps saying,

When attempting to formulate a persuasive argument, this isn't a great place to start in my opinion. It's perfectly acceptable to dislike Trump and his policies. If you do, then go ahead and state your reasons. He was elected by the people of his country and he'll be done in four years' time. That's not how kings generally function. Perhaps I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I don't find myself too interested in reading the article after the inflammatory introductory TLDR.

peterdsharpe2• 1 year ago

You imply that the title "King of America" is pejorative, but did he or did he not refer to himself as a king? As far as I can tell, he endorsed this title.

To add on this, prediction markets currently put Trump Sr. as 8.5% likely to win the 2028 GOP nomination (electionbettingodds.com). So, I wouldn't take your "he'll be done in four years" as certainty. The market thinks things are far more precarious than you do.

showdeaduser• 1 year ago

Do these prediction markets pay interest? If not I'd rather not pay $0.915 for a $1.00 payout in three years.

Clubber2• 1 year ago

The cloud cometh and the cloud slowly fades away.

megous3• 1 year ago

It would be funny if I survived my web dev career without ever having to touch AWS and friends, just because CPU core count, memory bandwidth, etc. scaling got to a point a single machine could handle total population of my country. :D

Clubber2• 1 year ago

I'm sure you are aware that companies can buy more than one machine for their datacenter.

ein0p• 1 year ago

It never was safe in the first place. Storing sensitive data in a locale under the jurisdiction where it can be freely accessed without your knowledge has always been idiotic. That's why all proper, sovereign countries demand that their data, and that of their citizens, is stored in datacenters within their national borders.

xqcgrek2• 1 year ago

The US should stop subsidizing the EU. It's clear Europe has nothing to offer the US, economically or geopolitically.

watwut8• 1 year ago

You are aware that US business selling stuff to Europe is what makes trade deficit smaller? It is not a subsidy for a business to sell and get money.

croes10• 1 year ago

Nothing to offer?

Then why the tariffs?

isaacremuant• 1 year ago

And yet, the European governments (EU or not) are usually extremely happy with their own government overreach "to combat the usual demons" (drugs, terrorism, protect children, etc) and now they've added "misinformation" as a way to combat political opposition of any kind with no oversight.

Living in Europe I'm more skeptical about OP who ends with 'maga/Elon musk' as if this was in any way partisan and I'm pretty sure OP would be in favour of certain tactics based on political alignment.

The trump derangement syndrome is very boring this time around. It just doesn't land considering so many people "fighting fascism" were more than willing to "put people in camps" if they didn't comply with anti constitutional and tyrannical covid policies for "the greater good".

It's good that people care about privacy but it's better when they're consistent and not just partisan hacks.

cuuupid• 1 year ago

One oft forgotten thing is that the US government clouds rated for IL5/6 are secluded on SIPRnet and JWICS. These are totally separate networks with CDS’s being the only way to go from one net to the other.

In practice this means the US Government remains in control of the network backing their cloud. ITAR regulations make it treasonous to have foreign eyes on these clouds. Foreign governments are not afforded any of those protections when sitting on US clouds.

Even among FVEY, there are designations for data relative to member states and information is not as free flowing on JWICS as one might assume. It is more like a controlled stream than a raging river

snickerbockers5• 1 year ago

Did none of these people read Machiavelli? Relying too much on foreign governments, especially "friendly" imperialists is never safe because it gives them a degree of control over you. That's a problem no matter who is in charge. If you slept through the PRISM scandal and are only regretting your failure to take action because you don't like the guy who just won an election, then you're beyond salvation.

At the very minimum you should be encrypting all data before you transmit it to machines you don't physically control, but even that's not necessarily good enough because it still gives them the ability to withhold that data from you. And that's to speak nothing of some hypothetical future technology that may be able to defeat your encryption entirely.

TechDebtDevin2• 1 year ago

The world would be better off if people, like yourself (no offense) would read Machiavelli as a satire.

snickerbockers5• 1 year ago

Well at the very least you need to take the stuff about power dynamics to heart, because that's the part that's most relevant and the part that modern Europeans have the worst understanding of.

I find Europeans to be particularly annoying because they've willingly turned themselves into de-facto vassal-states without even realizing it, and despite constantly panicking over the outcomes of internal American politics they never learn their lesson or take any real steps to become less dependent on the United States.

I'm pretty sure I remember the exact same conversations about whether it's safe to host data in America eight years ago, because they haven't changed at all. I happen to think they're over-reacting and that Trump isn't going to do anything with their precious data, but they're well within their rights to have negative opinions about internal american politics. However it's also incumbent upon them to understand that they have no standing in who the American people elect, and that if they don't feel safe not being America's #1 priority they need to become more self-reliant. Europe is not the center of the world to us, they're just another one of the six continents that aren't North America.

ideashower• 1 year ago

I haven't read Machiavelli, where would you recommend I begin for this in particular?

Pooge2• 1 year ago

The Prince[1]. Although I think it's not very "readable" for today's standards. I've had a much easier time reading political science books that were written more recently.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57037

svilen_dobrev2• 1 year ago

check this "Machiavelli for kids".. seems gone as of now, so in archive.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160304023516/https://www.claud...

snickerbockers5• 1 year ago

"The Prince" is the important one, IIRC he wrote some plays and such too but Prince is where his name got associated with cutthroat politics. It's a pretty boring read but it's not difficult to understand, I read it when I was 14 and I didn't have any significant difficulties even though I lacked context in contemporary Italian politics. Even though I was bored out of my mind (i did not read this book by choice) its been a major influence on my life because it explains all the different ways your choices can have surprising results in the long run if they're planned well by you (or your adversary).

It's a book he wrote about how to maintain power in a feudal society, with references to many historical events to back up his arguments. Usually it comes down to being wary of accepting help from somebody else unless you understand their motivations, what they stand to gain, and what you stand to lose in the long run. It's sort of like "Art of War" in that it's written for a specific time and place but the principles behind it are so universal they can be applied to many different situations, even business management and interpersonal relationships.

So anyways, my point in the OP above was that this is the sort of situation that he wrote extensively about; obviously there weren't any computers or cloud storage in 15th-century Italy, but he definitely makes several points on the dangers of relying too heavily on third parties for resources, because it gives them leverage with which to manipulate them.

crazygringo5• 1 year ago

That ship has sailed with technology in general.

Sure, it isn't safe for EU governments to store data on US clouds.

It also isn't safe for US governments to rely on chips made in Taiwan that China could invade. Or for TikTok to be a primary media source in the US.

The fact is, we're an economically interconnected world at this point, in terms of software, in terms of hardware, and in terms of hardware supply chains.

And it's hard to see it going backwards. Economic efficiency is a powerful force. It often seems like the solution has to be to try to implement as many safeguards as possible, rather than cut off sources of technology. But I don't know... it's an incredibly difficult question.

hinkley5• 1 year ago

There’s an old civics aphorism: if goods don’t cross borders, then armies will.

Giving all your data to foreign states though may be a bridge too far. That’s not the same as buying cars or Swedish Fish.

crazygringo5• 1 year ago

Giving all your data to foreign states though may be a bridge too far.

Does it really matter?

If large Western countries want to spy on each other, there are so many ways via so many devices.

That's why I'm talking about safeguards -- why not just focus on ensuring everything is encrypted in rest and in transit, so you can use anybody's cloud anywhere?

gmuslera• 1 year ago

Since now? It was safe before, as in what is happening now was totally impossible before, and somewhat it happens anyway? Do they started to care about making backups after they lost data?

Risk is not about "something happened, so it may happen again", but if something bad can happen, if it is possible, and maybe weight it as probable or not. Black swans exists, and if you bet everything on that they not, you may lose everything.

And the process of moving government and societies to some controlled by a foreign power cloud takes time to get in, and to get out. And you can't tell that something bad was being done while showing a smiling face.

It is not something coming out of the blue. There was strong signals of intervention back to the start of internet, and a more or less official confirmation of what was happening in the shadow with Snowden's revelations. But somewhat is now when that is perceived as a risk.

wongarsu• 1 year ago

It has always been unsafe, it is very questionable under the GDPR (though governments are obviously excluded from the GDPR itself), and lots of governments and companies have been using or working on alternatives. But the temptation of of US clouds has been strong, and now is a good time to remember everyone who previously thought the benefits outweighed the risks

SecretDreams• 1 year ago

The only clear difference between now and even not that long ago is the fair perception that the US has flipped from (probably) "lawful neutral" to "chaotic evil".

Secrets in US cloud were probably never fully safe.. but at least the US wasn't previously on a path to inflict pain on the rest of the world.

red-iron-pine5• 1 year ago

the US government was invading and bombing people for decades and the EU did nothing. "chaotic evil" my ass, the only reason they're moving now is because MAGA is threatening them directly via Greenland, or indirectly, by pulling out of NATO and backing Russia.

Mailtemi• 1 year ago

In addition to Cloud, there is one more thing: Mobile. Banks. Parking lots. Shops. Europe should invest in a Linux phone OS with NFC and unified push notifications.

hedora17• 1 year ago

Yeah. Progressive web apps are a great way to hedge bets on this. They also bypass App Store censorship, binary tampering, etc.

Maybe someone will revive firefox os or build a better successor to it.

Ideally, there’d be a law saying that any government service (direct, or contracted out, so including infrastructure like parking and EV charging) must be offered via a PWA that works in EurOS, iOS and Android.

vasilipupkin• 1 year ago

US is an unreliable partner. EU needs to work on decoupling from it ASAP in every domain.

devsda• 1 year ago

Hopefully, this push will stop the trend of calling countries trying to legislate data residency and privacy laws to keep their citizens data out of foreign prying eyes as authoritarian and painting them as threats balkanizing the free internet.

Wishful thinking? may be, because the world isn't and doesn't have to be fair.

raincom• 1 year ago

It is NEVER "safe to move for any government and secrets to US clouds", unless you want to be spied up on.

nthingtohide• 1 year ago

Russia found about it the hard way when Google and Apple payment services were suspended.

hedora17• 1 year ago

In fairness, the whole international consumer banking industry cut them off. Try using your Visa card or PayPal on a Russian web site.

Nasrudith2• 1 year ago

I don't think it is safe to move to anybody's cloud if you are concerned about spying. We have seen far too many invocations of the magical words "national security" and "think of the children" universally.

pphysch2• 1 year ago

The PRC essentially pioneered the concept of digital sovereignty with the "Great Firewall" approach in the late 90s. It was famously ridiculed by Bill Clinton as a hopeless endeavour.

In the wake of 2014 and souring relations with the West, Russia also started looking more seriously at digital sovereignty. This was castigated as "isolationism" and an attack on the "open Internet".

Now it's nearing a household term among EU tech groups. Because this was never about democratic ideals, it is about power and control, especially in a volatile multipolar world.

dralley3• 1 year ago

Comparing digital sovereignty w/r/t critical services are hosted to "The Great Firewall" is absurd. It's not the same thing at all.

China and Russia blocking YouTube is different from making sure the entire EU government and economy can't be collapsed by US turning the screws on Amazon.

pphysch2• 1 year ago

Come on. We can draw a straight line from the GFW to companies like Baidu and Alibaba. Without it, they would (initially) struggle in direct competition with endemic US products.

century192• 1 year ago

I have interviewed Turkish people that did not have Cloud experience as their large companies (e.g. banks) were not allowed to use US cloud services. Seems like that was wise now.

markus_zhang• 1 year ago

EU should build their own cloud services. I mean it's not rocket science, but I don't know anything in EU that can compete with the big three.

fransje264• 1 year ago

You don't need to compete with the big three if they are part of a world order crumbling in front of your eyes.

You need to build services that allow you to continue to function as democracies and that ensure you can tackle the challenges ahead.

breadwinner5• 1 year ago

Is it safe to store data in Germany, given the strong showing of AfD in the election? They are now in second place, and who knows what will happen in the next 5 years!

AfD is pro-Russia and pro-Trump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AfD_pro-Russia_movement

fsflover8• 1 year ago

It's safe to use FLOSS solutions with e2e encryption.

breadwinner5• 1 year ago

Not for long: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/microsoft-quantum...

croes10• 1 year ago

Political parties in Germany don’t have the same power as the president in the US.

breadwinner5• 1 year ago

What about the Chancellor?

timewizard• 1 year ago

No governments are trust worthy.

When did Hacker News start believing they are?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

dennis_jeeves22• 1 year ago

When did Hacker News start believing they are?

I think the 'majority' were always like that, though I think in the recent years the proportions became higher.

waihtis• 1 year ago

Meanwhile author makes zero comment on UK encryption nonsense, or the mad EU drive towards absolute information control.

Its just another case of rocket + orange man bad

croes10• 1 year ago

Because the US are the bigger threat.

The EU has much more leverage against the UK.

DrNosferatu15• 1 year ago

European Democracies should start a, new, NATO-like military Alliance on their own, but without Trump's America.

(and without the notorious US-made military equipment kill-switches)

And while we're at it, this time will be different: Instead of the membership criteria being anti-communism, it should be effective Liberal Democracy and Freedom from Exceptionalist Exemptions, namely from the International Rule of Law. So, to be part,

1. Compulsory ICC membership - hence no exceptionalistic US, and no exceptionalistic Israel.

2. No "Illiberal Democracies": say, for example, composite of a minimum 0.67 score on the WJP Rule of Law Index and others: therefore no Orbanic Hungary, and no illiberal others like it. Poland, Slovakia, Italy: you better watch your ways if you want in.

3. Democratic backsliding removes you rights in the Alliance, and, can proportionally lead to outright expulsion.

Not one more new military equipment purchase from the US, (and dispreference for other non-qualifying nations procurement). Member nations should use their - substantial - industrial capacity to equip themselves with indigenous military materiel.

Hey, it would be actually great for their economy!

Initially European scope, but bridges to a broader global scope (or even a secondary sister-Alliance) with open-ended partnerships with Canada, Australia, New Zeland, Japan, South Korea, and yes: Taiwan.

US and/or Israel want to join, if a more Democratic future selves? Simple: fully join the ICC, and meet the Alliance's full criteria as every other member.

Same applies for prospective new members.

DrNosferatu15• 1 year ago

Curious for any specific feedback!

albroland• 1 year ago

1. How do you intend to pay for it? 2. How do you intend to enforce it? 3. How do you intend to defend it?

How many tanks can you deploy? IFVs? Artillery? How much ammunition can you supply? How many fighters are in service and mission ready? Bombers? Tanker aircraft? Transport? Helicopters? How many battalions (of any type) can be formed/deployed?

Repeat the same exercise in the context of a navy.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/584035/defense-expenditu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294391/nato-tank-streng... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293688/nato-aircraft-st...

chasd002• 1 year ago

Will the members truly be willing to goto war (even nuclear war) to enforce the agreement? Unless the entire planet believes that whole heartedly the pact is meaningless.

I have my doubts, without the US NATO is largely toothless IMO.

DrNosferatu15• 1 year ago

Genuinely confused:

Why the downvotes?

In 2025, Trump dumped Ukraine, sided with Putin and made a number of bully threats (including invasion) to its formal National Security partners. Security which - at least still today - is bound by literal treaty.

Should Europe just roll over and wag its tail?

DrNosferatu15• 1 year ago

What kind of partnership is this that one side wants to boss around its only-good-if-wimp partner?

blackeyeblitzar4• 1 year ago

Illiberal democracies start with suppression and control of speech. Which is core to the EU regime currently.

without the notorious US-made military equipment kill-switches

Evidence?

DrNosferatu15• 1 year ago

It’s a secondary point, but sure,

It’s a widely common practice:

France had kill switches in its export Exocet missiles - why wouldn’t the US have also kill switches in its export equipment?

It would actually be strange if they were absent.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ui54r7/france_urged...

DrNosferatu15• 1 year ago

Illiberal democracies start with suppression and control of speech. Which is core to the EU regime currently.

Really?

The EU limits explicit calls to violence, genocide denial, and coordinated disinformation campaigns.

Meanwhile, Russia imprisons people for holding blank signs, China censors Winnie the Pooh, and Hungary closed its last independent radio station.

Don’t you think your standards for what free speech is could be slightly different, depending to whom they apply?

DrNosferatu15• 1 year ago

Interesting how you demand evidence for technical claims while making sweeping political statements without any.

Speaking of speech control - how many Russian journalists have mysteriously fallen out of windows recently? …or is evidence only required for Western claims?

rdm_blackhole4• 1 year ago

3. Democratic backsliding removes you rights in the Alliance, and, can proportionally lead to outright expulsion.

Ok, so the alliance is a non starter then.

The invalidation of the result of the referendum in France related to the EU constitution in 2005 by the signing of the Lisbon treaty a year or so later was a clear demonstration that the will of the people was not respected.

The fact that the EU is pushing for the Chat Control law in order to access all your data on your phone, emails, pictures of your loved ones at all times without any reasonable causes/warrants is clearly an attempt to muzzle the population.

Then there is the invalidation of the Romanian election not long ago which was done under the guise of protecting democracy.

Then we can talk about the different parties in power in France /Germany and elsewhere who refuse to work with right wing parties that have been elected fair and square in parliament once again under the guise of protecting democracy and therefore are sending a clear signal that no matter who you vote for, the mainstream parties will refuse to listen/compromise and prefer to brand everyone who do not agree with them as Nazi extremists.

I thought that democracy was that the will of the people was to be respected but it turns out that ignoring 20 to 30% of your population because you don't agree with them is just easier.

To think that the EU has the gall to give lessons of democracy to authoritarian regimes....

DrNosferatu15• 1 year ago

Your examples actually demonstrate democracy working, not failing:

1. France used constitutional processes for the Lisbon Treaty - or should we never adapt treaties as circumstances change?

2. Chat Control (wich I don’t personally agree) is being debated, modified, opposed - that's democracy in action. Try publicly opposing surveillance laws in China.

3. Refusing to coalition with anti-democratic parties IS protecting democracy. Just like we don't let parties run on platforms of abolishing elections.

Democracy isn't just counting votes - it's sustaining a system where we can keep voting freely. That's why we have guardrails.

Or would you prefer we just have one final vote to end all voting?

GMoromisato• 1 year ago

The world has changed, but the EU acts like the solutions that used to work will continue to work in the future. Neither regulating limits to AI nor waiting for Trump's term to end will solve the underlying problem.

First, Trump's rise in the US is not an isolated phenomenon. Almost every country in Europe has its own right-wing, anti-globalization, pro-nativist parties, and in almost all countries their power has grown. Globalization decreased economic friction, but not evenly--there were winners and losers. The winners were the professional class who could sell their services to a global market. The losers were the labor class who saw their jobs outsourced and who had to pay more to the professionals they needed (doctors, teachers, etc.). The result was Trump.

US policies will moderate as Trump's failures pile up, but we're never going back to the globalist, "citizens of the world" consensus of the 2000s.

Second, (and ironically), globalization has given leverage to high-agency individuals to amass more power than previously possible. Billionaires are exerting influence (Musk, obviously, but also Gates, Bezos, Marc Benioff, Bloomberg, Koch brothers, etc.) not just because they have money, but because money can influence more people through globalized businesses. Social media is the obvious vector, but even a business like Starbucks has influence by how they set labor trends.

Moreover, authoritarians like Putin are only constrained by hard power, not by international institutions. And ironically, the whole point of international institutions is to decrease investment in hard power! The result is that people like Putin can do whatever they want.

It is obvious that globalization, as currently structured, has failed. But no one (to my mind) has yet proposed a better model. The left wants to keep globalization and tinker around the edges; the right wants to tear it all down and retreat to autarchy.

Eventually, the world will enter a more stable equilibrium. Whoever can see that new equilibrium can prepare for it or even influence how it comes about. Anyone got any ideas?

arunabha• 1 year ago

There are obviously strong emotions on both sides regarding the actions of the first few weeks of the Trump administration. Whether you believe the goals are worthy or not, one must acknowledge that the manner in which all of this is being done is deeply disturbing.

Trump will be gone in a few years, one way or the other. However, the foundations that are being poured for legitimizing a strongman, authoritarian role for the executive and almost eliminating the role of the other two branches is deeply dangerous.

If you believe the goals are worthy enough that the ends justify the means, think of the worst president ever(in your opinion) and consider whether you'd want them to have the same power? Because politicians never let power go willingly. They will certainly point to Trump's precedent as a means of legitimizing their actions.

My fervent hope is that our institutions are strong enough to weather this assault and that enough people make it clear to the administration that there are lines they are not willing to cross. Whether that happens remains to be seen.

russellendicott• 1 year ago

I just see this as an experiment to see if the system can survive without the bloat. If we need the bloat, the next person can just put it all back in. It's only 4 years.

acdha2• 1 year ago

That’s like saying your car’s airbags and turn signals are bloat because you’ve never used them. It will already take more than 4 years to repair the immediate damage by firing so many people: in addition to the lost institutional knowledge, consider how much more you have to pay them to come back after proving to be an unreliable employer. If a scientist goes to Europe, they’re not lightly moving to the United States in a couple of years.

Some of the long-term consequences are permanent: everyone in Europe unambiguously knows that the post-war dynamic is gone, and if they invest in their own alternatives they won’t want to throw away that investment. As an example, allies who bought F-35s are wondering if they should’ve followed the French path now that they’re faced with the prospect of being on the other side from America. If they decide to move to European control of key infrastructure, they’re not moving back for at least a generation.

whimsicalism7• 1 year ago

I worry about the rising tides of nationalism/anti-globalism both in the US and in Europe. I view things like this as accelerating the trend, not 'resist'ing it.

hedora17• 1 year ago

War is already here and expanding. The US will probably switch sides and align with Russia.

It wouldn’t surprise me if NATO is replaced with something that excludes the US and includes Ukraine, Greenland, Canada and Mexico.

whimsicalism7• 1 year ago

If 'US switch sides' means US giving military or financial support to Russia in the war, I strongly doubt it. If it means Trump giving rhetorical support to Russia, sure.

I'm willing to bet against both the military support for Russia & the NATO dissolution at 4:1 odds before end of this year and 2:1 before end of next year.

I don't think anyone serious actually thinks either of those things are going to happen so I doubt anyone would take me up on that offer.

chasd002• 1 year ago

The US will get closer to Russia in order to pull Putin away from China. Isolating China is a higher priority than saving Ukraine.

pedropaulovc• 1 year ago

This is nothing new, Microsoft signed an agreement with the French government to build a sovereign cloud called Bleu [1] operated by Orange and Capgemini using Azure and Microsoft 365 technology. The German government did something similar and launched Delos Cloud, operated by SAP and Arvato Systems.

[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/05/27/223...

[2] https://www.bertelsmann.com/news-and-media/news/first-sovere...

based2• 1 year ago

https://www.cert.ssi.gouv.fr/cti/CERTFR-2025-CTI-001/

https://cyber.gouv.fr/decouvrir-les-solutions-qualifiees

layer82• 1 year ago

called Bleu operated by Orange and […] using Azure

This is somehow funny.

zekrioca• 1 year ago

Not sure how the person doesn’t realize the contradiction.

pm30033• 1 year ago

The pun is intended.

maelito2• 1 year ago

Aweful strategists did that, if they weren't simply corrupted.

pm30033• 1 year ago

The reasoning is that, with sufficient security, on premise (more or less) cloud technology is not much different in terms of sovereinty from sourcing your hardware from China.

BiteCode_dev• 1 year ago

That was such a low blow, given we have stellar companies like OVH that have demonstrated their skills and willingness to bring great hosting, and are fully local.

nektro• 1 year ago

using Azure and Microsoft 365 technology

then they didn't do what the article is suggesting

red-iron-pine5• 1 year ago

The German government did something similar and launched Delos Cloud, operated by SAP and Arvato Systems.

this will be an overpriced nightmare

pacifika• 1 year ago

What’s the alternative to ICANN?

lazzlazzlazz3• 1 year ago

ENS[1] and Box[2] come to mind. The crypto people have been contemplating this for a long time.

[1] https://ens.domains/ [2]: https://my.box/

docmars2• 1 year ago

I see what this guy is saying, but one important thing this article misses entirely is: Trump was elected with overwhelming support, and is carrying out the will of the people. I think people should stop pretending that his decisions weren't commissioned, and deluding themselves into believing that he's acting on his sole authority somehow.

croes10• 1 year ago

He got less than 50% of the votes

hedora17• 1 year ago

His most popular policies have about 50% support. Most poll at 2:1 or 3:1 against:

https://archive.is/C08bk

jmward01• 1 year ago

There are two questions here: Should gov/company/actual human use x, y or z from the US and HOW can they avoid it? I personally don't see a lot of strong answers to the 'how' question right now. At a basic level I think this is because we don't have a clear, coherent 'cloud OS' that makes it easy to build alternative offerings.

I run proxmox and try to host some things locally but the server offerings aren't quite there yet. What would be amazing would be for me to be able to truly host my own cloud so that I could share a doc with someone and the editor was hosted by my servers and safely sandboxed. It would be extraordinary if I could get my phone to offload storage to my personal cloud in place of iCloud and this was as easy as pointing to my personal cloud instead if being, at best, still a patchwork.

Things like portainer, podman, proxmox, etc are putting different pieces together but they are missing the crucial ingredients of exposing themselves to the internet safely and easily and being the foundation that my personal OS can actually easily run on. This split between device OS and cloud OS is something that hasn't yet really happened and it is holding us back from creating a viable alternative ecosystem to commercial offerings. I think the things missing from current offerings like proxmox are:

1) The cloud OS of the future needs to expose VPNs and control domains as first class citizens so that my devices can join it securely and natively. These resources are the hard-drives and network cards of a cloud OS but they are treated like apps in current offerings. 2) It needs to integrate with auth in ways that allow me to 'share' a doc from my personal cloud just as easily as google does and allow others to connect in secure, controlled ways. There isn't a point to opening up to the internet if you can't allow others to connect safely. 3) It needs to integrate with other clouds and provide native ways to migrate data and services between your personal cloud and other clouds. 4) It needs to seamlessly expand from user level cloud to enterprise and beyond. This is the 'Developers developers developers' moment. If I can develop in my local cloud things that I can deploy to a real enterprise could then I will build a lot of things even if they don't go to the enterprise.

I think building the route to 'how' is the important question here. You can't just legislate 'use the alternative' if the alternative doesn't exist. So what is the route here? How do we get to a point where it is actually possible to choose a different cloud? I think there are a couple ways here but a core component is likely a split in linux to start a cloud native install path. Basically, when you install on a machine it always installs as a container running on a hypervisor/cloud OS so the machine joins/starts a cloud OS install first and then the user OS installs are virtualized on top from the start. Basically, bare-metal should belong exclusively to the cloud OS. I think this likely would create the initial split needed to focus efforts on developing the cloud OS separate from the user OS and possibly start us down a path where the ecosystem exists to enable people to hop off of US cloud providers. As a side benefit though it would make migrating to new hardware way easier since I could likely just migrate my virtualized environment after joining it to the cloud OS the old machine is hosted on.

brundolf2• 1 year ago

I wonder if growing distrust in the american cloud will benefit companies like Oxide in coming years

matt-p11• 1 year ago

Who are based where? Same fundamental problem right, you still can't get overall security (of continued supply, support and software/firmware)

brundolf2• 1 year ago

Their software stack is open-source, and their machines don't have any telemetry or external dependencies. They're designed to be air-gap-able, while still giving you a cloud-like experience

deadbabe2• 1 year ago

With the backlash European companies are making toward US tech, can US companies now rip up their GDPR policies in return and stop with these cookie banners everywhere?

bittermandel2• 1 year ago

There's quite a lot going on over the last year or two to actually build a real cloud in Europe, which is basically nott just dedis/VMs like on Hetzner or OVH. Take a look at Clever Cloud or Molnett!

zhengiszen2• 1 year ago

Sovereign nations... Europe is not sadly

blackeyeblitzar4• 1 year ago

This article is not a reasonable take on the situation. It is saying America isn’t a “reliable partner”. What does that mean? Demanding that NATO countries pay their fair share instead of free loading, is now not being a reliable partner? If anything it’s the other way around, considering the US has funded Europe’s defense. America is still the best partner for Europe and it makes more sense for the two to rely on each other than to waste resources while China - an actual dangerous dictatorship - continues to rise.

It’s also odd to paint Trump as “dictatorial” given that European leaders constantly look for ways to control or punish free speech, or for ways to suppress election results they don’t like. Look at the coup in Ukraine in 2014, the actions taken after it, or the proposal to ban AfD in Germany, or the effort to reverse the Romanian election. It’s EU leadership that has become authoritarian.

croes10• 1 year ago

Negotiate with russia about Ukraine without Ukraine.

Calling a elected president of country a dictator and spread false claims of 4% approval.

Bringing in a UN resolution that lacks the part where Russia is the aggressor in the war with Russia.

Blackmailing a country that fights for survival to get rare earths.

And for free speech, the US don’t have free speech. People are silenced by fear by „free-speech“ abolitionists so they don’t dare to speak freely in fear of repressive measures.

That’s law of the jungle not free speech.

And the AfD is full of enemies of the constitution and that’s illegal as a party in Germany.

Nobody prohibits to be such an enemy of the state but you can’t expect to get paid by germany tax payers for trying to destroy that state. That his neither authoritarian nor anti-free-speech.

hedora17• 1 year ago

You forgot threatening to annex greenland, canada and panama, and attempting to put an end to mexican sovereignty.

blackeyeblitzar4• 1 year ago

And for free speech, the US don’t have free speech. People are silenced by fear by „free-speech“ abolitionists so they don’t dare to speak freely in fear of repressive measures.

The US is basically the only country with good free speech laws. I am not saying they’re perfect, but I’m not sure what your argument on that point is. Can you share something more specific and explain how it invalidates the American constitutional protections on free speech?

And the AfD is full of enemies of the constitution and that’s illegal as a party in Germany.

You either have a democracy where people can choose their leaders or you don’t. It appears Germany doesn’t. Preventing a party that is popular, from existing or participating in elections, is literally authoritarian and anti free speech by definition.

Bringing in a UN resolution that lacks the part where Russia is the aggressor in the war with Russia.

What do you call the illegal coup in 2014? It removed the representation of everyone in Crimea and Donbas right? What about NATO expansionism? The aggressor isn’t very clear. I would argue that the 2014 coup and efforts to suppress Russian ethnic people in Ukraine was an act of aggression that eventually led to this conflict.

Blackmailing a country that fights for survival to get rare earths.

This framing just shows how thankless it can be for America to help Europe. Asking for something fair in return for hundreds of billions in defense and security funding (not just in this conflict but for a much longer time), especially since it helps remove China’s rare earth control, is reasonable. It’s not blackmail to propose a fair deal. Ukraine and Europe are also certainly free to refuse the deal and not expect American taxpayers (whose pocket this comes out of) to help them further, considering they’ve already done so much.

serial_dev3• 1 year ago

It is no longer safe? Like it was safe a month ago? It was safe with Biden, Obama or Bush as presidents?

It baffles me how people look at other administrations through rose colored glasses and pretend that the problem started since Trump took over and Musk is working on this DOGE stunt. The swamp has always been there.

It was never safe, and never will be, no matter who is the president and how outrageous some of their actions are.

This article didn’t need the picture of “Trump is signing things”. This article cannot be taken seriously because of that, and it’s so frustrating because otherwise it made good points.

acdha2• 1 year ago

Nothing is safe in absolute terms but through Obama, European leaders could feel confident that the United States would honor its treaty obligations. The idea of an American President working in conjunction with Russia to run a shakedown on a European power wasn’t even viable in the Tom Clancy-level of cold war novel.

So I’d think of it similar to how climate change has affected property risk assessment: even if your home was never absolutely safe from flooding or wildfire, your practical assessment of how much effort you should spend protecting against those risks was quite reasonably lower in the era before once in a century or once in a thousand years events became once in a decade.

skrebbel4• 1 year ago

To all the people saying that this is nothing new: to me the key point here is that the author of this article, Bert Hubert, isn't your average activist / purist linux hacker. He's at least somewhat influential in government circles, in that he has held various government IT consulting positions and is listened to by lots of government IT workers. He's one of the few people I know of who deeply understands how tech works, and also deeply understands how government works (at least the Dutch government). He's also a frequent guest in radio and TV shows and the likes.

I'm hoping that this article acts as a catalyst for the Dutch government, and other EU governments, to move everything away from American clouds.

tempodox• 1 year ago

Here's to hoping that decision makers will listen to him.

Mossy97• 1 year ago

I hope so too, but move where? Does Scaleway or UpCloud or any other EU cloud provider have comparable offerings? Sure, if everything you have is running on containers or VMs, the stuff is easy to port to Hetzner et al., but what to do with the cloud specific apps (Azure functions etc.)? Rebuilding those for other platforms is probably a no-go unless the Union pours billions into supporting this.

Though I've cursed it for years, I'm increasingly glad our org's cloud migration has been so slow that we've only now rolled out the first apps. Pretty much everything we've build can be run anywhere we want, so if it's time to drop the ball and go back to onprem, we've not wasted anything but time on setting up the base

wahnfrieden• 1 year ago

Canada

1over1372• 1 year ago

I hope so too, but move where?

On premises.

buildfocus• 1 year ago

Scaleway at least is genuinely not a bad alternative for this kind of thing already today - they do have plenty of managed services like serverless functions, object storage, queues, etc, in addition to the simple VMs and container hosting.

portaouflop• 1 year ago

OVH? Hertzner?

kefirlife• 1 year ago

OpenFaaS is one option for your functions. Knative is pretty good as well for the bulk of your applications without exposing developers to kubernetes directly. Between that and Crossplane I think you have all the pieces needed to move away to a self hosted solution where you are managing either metal or VMs through a hosting provider.

I’m not sure what this looks like outside of the US, but colocation providers offer racks of machines, or to host your machines, while providing access to cheap bandwidth and peering capabilities. It’s absolutely possible to move away from the major cloud providers. However, it will require a degree of investment within your organization to support these deployments no matter which you choose, which could be a new investment compared to using AWS, GCP or Azure.

anon848736283• 1 year ago

Isn't Google doing some thing where they give the software stack to a local operating partner?

I guess you can say the code is still backdoored / untestable but it seems that could be audited.

riehwvfbk• 1 year ago

but what to do with the cloud specific apps (Azure functions etc.)?

Don't build them. Vendor lock-in is a real problem: even if there are no political issues, it's a business risk because they can charge you whatever they want.

Also, the cost of migrating off these things is usually overestimated. It's an HTTP request, for crying out loud.

6510• 1 year ago

If it costs billions then that is what it costs.

preisschild2• 1 year ago

https://european-alternatives.eu/

_carbyau_• 1 year ago

I find that often people conflate "move to cloud" with "take crusty thick client application and webify it".

Replace (most, not all) crusty apps with a web version - sounds good to me. Put it in the cloud - that's optional.

0xbadcafebee3• 1 year ago

but move where?

For hosting their government's own specific computing needs, and assuming a respectable GDP, they can build their own datacenters (pretty trivial) and hire contractors to build cloud computing environments (more challenging).

Open source cloud isn't too hard. There's OSS for about 80% of software needed for a cloud computing service provider, and you fill in the rest with proprietary and custom stuff. There's already several providers (one in the US, several in the EU/other countries) that offer "public cloud" using OpenStack. They literally give you, the customer, your own OpenStack cluster, and bill you for what you use. It's insanely easy and powerful. Yet everybody still uses the more popular providers (DO, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc), despite the fact that they all have proprietary interfaces, without anything close to feature parity with OpenStack. I guess people really like vendor lock-in and lack of features.

The hardware is more challenging to source; the chips all come from Taiwan or China, and the US and China make most of the good hardware.

For private business in their country, they might offer grants and tax incentives to EU companies to build out more local cloud hosting services. But since it's the EU I'm sure it's massively more complicated than that.

stego-tech3• 1 year ago

but what to do with the cloud specific apps

Coming from IT land, the answer is simple: you don't use them in the first place, and you grit-and-bear the replacement cost if and when the time comes. This is a negative on my research notes, slide decks, and papers when it comes to evaluating various cloud platforms for our workloads, and yet it's also the number one reason we're forced into a specific provider (some leader loves their proprietary tooling, and forces us to use it).

Look, I'm not saying these proprietary tools are bad, per se, just that they have a steeper cost than initially presented to the consumer in terms of architecture complexity and inevitable migration. The very first question you should be asking before consuming niche or proprietary products from vendors is, "Can I do this in a standard way that's more portable?" For stuff like Azure Functions, the answer is emphatically yes - but it comes at the cost of managing additional infrastructure, which is often the main reason companies want to use those tools in the first place (a misguided notion about throwing out infrastructure to save money).

As for the solved problem of compute (VMs and Containers), well, literally any cloud provider should have that ready to go. The question is whether or not your org is willing to retain the talent needed to build and support your clouds internally, or if they'd rather pay higher outsourcing costs with vendor lock-in instead.

sreekanth850• 1 year ago

People who build vendor locked applications are making a short-sighted decision. Call me old-school, but vendor lock-in benefits developers more than businesses. Agree that they can learn new shuny things. A well-built application should run seamlessly on any Linux-based system without unnecessary dependencies on proprietary ecosystems.

Tarq0n• 1 year ago

The real moat is Azure AD and Exchange. The government IT teams I know can operate a fleet of VMs just fine, but they need email and identity management handled for them.

jasonvorhe• 1 year ago

I've been interviewing candidates using questions targeted at getting them to talk about experience instead of skill. Like asking about their involvement during production incidents, then drill down to see if there's anything interesting to focus on. Can probably also be gamed by AI but people are usually surprised about my approach and they often provide good feedback after the call, even if I have to decline their application so I guess it works somewhat well for both since it doesn't force anyone to just recite the same phrases.

NomDePlum2• 1 year ago

The concern isn't new. I've been involved in several UK government projects that considered moving to AWS.

Each time the discussion on moving to a US based provider was a big consideration, particularly the use of managed services that involve data was a hot topic. Part of the risk assessment was considering what the consequences might be if the US government became a bad actor. It was seen as high impact but extremely low probability. Starting to look like we got that part of the assessment wrong.

I think it will take time for the impetus to move to US clouds providers to slow and reverse but I'm not sure I'd be surprised if it does happen now.

int_19h9• 1 year ago

if the US government became a bad actor. It was seen as high impact but extremely low probability.

Was that before or after 2016?

grandempire2• 1 year ago

By that do you mean influential with the Obama/biden administration?

skrebbel4• 1 year ago

I said the word "Dutch" multiple times. The article itself says it a million times. So, no, not the "Obama/biden administration".

svilen_dobrev2• 1 year ago

heh.

by the course of looking for programming job, i have scanned hundreds of job-ads, incl. governmental. everybody-and-his-dog requires AWS/Azure/GCP knowledge as if it matters thaaaat much. These cloud-y things have become a mandatory buzzword, and i am not talking about sysadmin/devops.

In my last gig the system was kept cloud-agnostic, so moving between providers or on-prem be possible at any time. And i as CTO kept that good thing, although had to resist some pushes. But seems such cases are few - most places now dream of hyper mega-giga-scale and Lambdas and Big-queries.. while doodling few thousands of requests.

Lets see if there's any wind change.. vendor-lock is a real thing, with much deeper (architectural or life-cycle) consequences than usually perceived.

cavisne2• 1 year ago

The thing that gets me is the disingenuous parallel construction. Just say the truth.

Europe wants to improve its economy by growing their consumer tech industry. Some of these products like Google Analytics (the example he is upset about) are really hard to replicate (writing to a database on every visit to your website is an expensive thing to do, significantly more expensive than hosting the website!). So they've been slowly increasing the tariffs (disguised as privacy regulations) on US tech firms. It's gone poorly, even EU governments (let alone EU businesses) still use products like Google Analytics, and US tech firms have been able to engineer their way around the regulations, again doing a better job than EU governments who have been busted countless times for breaking GDPR with their own systems.

No one cares about any "data sharing agreement" or a "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" no one has ever heard of that has never done anything. Its a tariff with various ways to pick winners and losers.

The only thing thats changed is there is a higher chance these privacy regulations will be recognized as tariffs by the US.

pm30033• 1 year ago

What you describe is true, and it can also be counterproductive vecause to be competitive you need the best and cheapest services, and raising the prices doesn't often result in a healthier tech ecosystem. Typical Eurocrat thinking.

But EU citizens genuinely care about privacy, in part because of decades of totalitarian and near-totalitarian regimes.

There is another risk underpinning this, I'm not familiar with this so it's mostly hearsay on my part, but foreign firms in the US routinely get completely screwed in US courts, and fear the seizing of their data in discovery processes or other ways. The data sharing agreement was made to provide some degree of clarity or assurances in this regard.

I've met managers who are convinced that if they're not careful, their IP and business data will get stolen by their US competitors through various legal or less-legal means. EU executives have been detained for days at the border on suspicions of terrorism to coerce them into selling US assets. I can't judge if this is paranoia, and maybe those companies could make use of better protection against Chinese hackers but there's certainly some truth to that.

fasbiner2• 1 year ago

I certainly don't blame the activists for governments refusing to listen, but this threat was clear at least 15 years ago and I would expect someone as knowledgeable as Bert Hubert to have perceived it at the time.

Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher?

I hope you're right, but one of the rough dislocations of the present moment is the disconnect between how europeans conceive of their sovereignty and the reality of their economic, military, and cultural fragility in their relationship with the US and US companies.

No amount of grandstanding rhetoric and appeals to "courage" changes that if there are any serious economic consequences (caused by US/corporate coercion or otherwise), the government would likely fall and be replaced by someone more amenable to the status quo. What feels like a small price to pay for someone focused on security long-term may be an unacceptable price for someone focused on short-term outcomes in their political fortunes.

Recurecur• 1 year ago

The concerns expressed seem a bit silly, unless the various Euro systems didn't take the very basic approach of using open standards and avoiding lock-in. Oh, and they should be backing up their data somewhere besides "in the cloud".

If those very basic precautions had been taken, migrating to a Euro cloud, or a private environment (open cloud stack) would be trivial.

If not, a lot of people should be fired...but granted, there are a lot of stupid people out there...

All that said, I'd say the concerns around this are vastly overblown.

skrebbel4• 1 year ago

Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher?

I believe so, yes. I don't think Americans realize how profoundly the last few weeks have affected European political thought. It'll take a while before you see concrete changes. Europe is like a mammoth tanker, slow to change direction, but practically unstoppable. I believe that it's more likely now than ever before for European governments and businesses to sever their dependency on American technology. Lots of comments in this thread explain how hard this is, how big the feature gap between, say, AWS and OVH is, but as a European entrepreneur I gotta say, this looks a lot more like an opportunity than a problem to me.

jononor2• 1 year ago

Why do you say that the cost of throwing out American tech giants has gone up by 100-1000x compared to 15 years ago? I mean before everything became cloud/SaaS, American software companies were still essential to most European business and governmental operations. It was just on more traditional server/desktop systems?

speleding• 1 year ago

I understand the sentiment, but as a Dutch person: The only thing I am more worried about than the government moving all our data to US clouds, is the government trying to do anything IT related themselves. They do not have the skill and have proven that over and over again in a long list of bungled projects.

I'd rather have my data end up with Google/Amazon/CIA than it ending up everywhere on the internet due to poorly configured DIY servers (and at twice the cost probably).

283042834092344• 1 year ago

That is because you only hear about the failures.

jononor2• 1 year ago

If there really is no organizations competent to run government application in the Netherlands, then that is even bigger reason to start doing more of that in the country. I mean, computers are not going away! The competence and infrastructure does not magically appear. It requires consistent investment over time. Not being able to maintain computer based infrastructure is like not being able to maintain water supply of a country. Completely unacceptable. Heck these days maintaining water supply at city scale is difficult without computers and networking...

raxxorraxor2• 1 year ago

The dependence was established sooner by using external infrastructure. The premises that this infrastructure is not under your control is exactly what he now derides.

Someone knowledgeable should have seen this before, this is a core issue when setting up a strategy for digital systems. And this isn't an issue between "purists" and the rest, that is a false dichotomy. The decision was simply to outsource infrastructure to systems you have significantly less control over.

Might work for 15+ years or it might not. I doubt anything will be done now, investments are probably too high. But it is an issue with lacking foresight.

Between countries and the main task for intelligence agencies is industrial espionage. The Dutch government, like many others, decided that exposing themselves is no issue.

I disagree that it has become a problem only now, this is due to his narrow view on politics and a bit naive in my opinion.

aerhardt2• 1 year ago

Cloud will continue to evolve massively with AI, as vendors offer more specialized infra and software abstractions, but the salient point is that in Europe we haven't even been able to build the first 10% of what providers like Amazon, Microsoft or Google offer. Hetzner was only "considering" a managed Postgres offering, last time I checked, ffs...

My take is that capital in Europe is (a) way too risk-averse and (b) fragmented across many European countries... As much as I've always sympathized with the EU, "Europe" as a single entity is a fucking lie, an illusion in our collective minds.

Try building a business in Spain, and then expanding to France. Yes, you have free movement of capital and labor to help you - which is a massive foundation - but after that all you'll find is red tape and difficulties emanating from the differences in culture and language.

Similarly, it seems impossible to privately amass the amount of capital needed for an investment such as what is needed to "make the first 10% of what AWS offers".

The only alternative is through continent-wide industrial policy, Draghi style[1]. More power to the bureaucrats in Brussels, and more taxes than we're already paying - and we're fucking suffocating already down here. No thanks!

This is why the future looks dire. My only hope is that maybe with AI software development becomes cheaper and we can all build more services in-house. But please someone give us at least the first 10-20% most useful cloud abstractions. I wouldn't want to waste even the compute-time of my AI engineers in building a resilient managed Postgres.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draghi_report

1over1372• 1 year ago

Canadian government IT is mostly all Microsoft. The government can't even send themselves email without it going through Microsoft, a company based in a country (USA) that wants to take over Canada. Insanity.

sam_lowry_7• 1 year ago

That's true for most EU governments as well. We lost the ability to host our own email infrastructure long before we moved to US clouds.

red-iron-pine5• 1 year ago

big tech has been pushing for cloud for a decade.

same companies that also happen to have advertising and data mining as primary functions. is there any surprise they made this call?

franczesko• 1 year ago

It is also supporting companies openly admitting to run projects for the US army and Israel (project Nimbus). This alone is already enough.

epolanski• 1 year ago

Few of my clients have been very nervous about this, and I know we're trying to ditch several US offerings with alternatives.

Microsoft is one of the hardest to get rid off, as it traverse the business from teams to SharePoint to azure dev ops and GitHub.

But when it comes to running systems themselves, there's valid European alternatives.

Mossy97• 1 year ago

As someone who has (reluctantly) been advocating and pushing our org to move stuff over to Azure, this is going to get interesting as tomorrow I'll start pushing the cart to the other direction. I never wanted to go to the cloud a a goal itself, but wished for a more modern infra to improve processes and security, which we surely now can achieve onprem as well.

Luckily there's always been scepticism and challenges with tightening data security regulations, so maybe people will mostly be relieved if we need to turn around on this.

Anyway, it will surely be an interesting discussion on Monday...

inetknght3• 1 year ago

As someone who has (reluctantly) been advocating and pushing our org to move stuff over to Azure

I get moving off of AWS and GCP. But to Azure? That move doesn't make sense to me at any time that Azure has been a thing. Why have you ever wanted to move things to Azure?

Mossy97• 1 year ago

Since practically every government in Europe is a Microsoft "shop", Azure is the first stop when The Cloud is concerned. Unofortunately, often the last one too... Wheels were already moving, I helped rhem gain traction.

So yeah, not my favorite of the whole "not my favorite" cloud migration plan, but the only realistic path forward at the time

deadbabe2• 1 year ago

Come to Cloudflare.

zombiwoof2• 1 year ago

Anything that fucks Bezos and Ellison is a good thing . There’s your argument

billy99k• 1 year ago

It wasn't safe when rogue engineers at Amazon colluded with the US government to take down Parler simply because they didn't like the politics they supported.

It wasn't safe when the US government worked with Twitter and Facebook to silence the opposing view points about Covid Vaccine injuries and lied to us constantly about the effectiveness.

There are children to this day that can't get heart transplants in the US because they don't have the Covid vaccine, which only 2% of American children have taken.

I know lots of people that took the J&J vaccine and it's been taken off the market due to deadly blood clots. Doctors mentioning this at the time were silenced and many lost their jobs.

When I see more people in the tech community talking about the authoritarian left that nearly destroyed our freedoms over the last 4 years, I might start listening to you about your concerns about our current state of politics.

rexpop• 1 year ago

AWS suspended Parler over violent content, not because of political views, and not in collusion with the state.

The J&J vaccine was not "taken off the market." It was temporarily paused to investigate rare blood clot cases. Out of 8.7 million doses administered, 28 cases of blood clots were identified, with three reported deaths. COVID-19 killed a million Americans, and would have killed more without the J&J vaccine which probably prevented 5.7 million infections and—with an R0 somewhere between 1.4 and 3.28—many millions more. This information was not suppressed, it's public knowledge discussed openly in scientific and medical communities.

There is an undeniable authoritarian element to the US federal government, but when has the US ever backed a "leftist" coup in a foreign country? There's no coherent "left" movement in the US. No socialist party.

Really, your victim mentality—fed by baseless conspiracy theories—is absurd, and your promotion of this harmful rhetoric endangers innocent lives. The US is a a police state, but not a meaningfully "left" one. It's a republican oligarchy.

nprateem2• 1 year ago

Lots of people seem to think this is only about data. The real risk is if trump says "ok, switch off the clouds for Europe"

Europe has no choice but to create its own subsidised cloud and mandate its use.

fransje264• 1 year ago

Europe has no choice but to create its own subsidised cloud and mandate its use.

Don't threaten me with a good time..

sunnybeetroot• 1 year ago

On the topic of this, what is the best platform similar to Digital Ocean App Platform that isn’t run by a US company?

submeta• 1 year ago

Trump is just openly saying what the previous governments have covertly been doing: Spying on their allies and enemies alike. Since the Snowden revelations we know that the US is spying on everyone. Not just citizens, but governments, allied politicians, just everyone. After the revelations there was a moment of shock in Europe. But eventually newspapers and magazines wrote less and less about it. The reality is: There‘s five eyes and Israel, and then there’s the rest of the world. And the world should start distancing itself from these malicious actors.

buyucu• 1 year ago

I suspect that Trump will have a very negative impact on US tech companies.

rsync2• 1 year ago

Just a reminder…

There are cloud infras (“clouds”) that are wholly independent of the large, entrenched, politically connected providers like Amazon and Microsoft.

We think of this as a monoculture wherein every single thing is somehow built on top of AWS. That’s not true.

noman-land• 1 year ago

This reminder would be a little more helpful if you gave some examples.

nhanb• 1 year ago

FWIW he _is_ an example already: https://rsync.net/

sirjaz• 1 year ago

All government systems should be on-prem, and secured by proper personnel. None of the data should be in a cloud providers hands, even by their own country's providers. There needs to be a separation between business and government infrastructure.

jart• 1 year ago

https://justine.lol/tmp/trump.jpg

pyrale2• 1 year ago

the legal basis for sharing personal data with American companies is dead since Donald Trump has neutered the special court that would make such transfers legal.

It was always dead, or rather, it's in a shrodinger's state where the EU comission puts bullshit in a box, and companies pretend it's fine until the CJEU opens the box and acknowledge that it is, in fact, bullshit. It's happened multiple times already.

Aside from that small quip, the article is, obviously, right. Any sane European would count their fingers after a handshake with this administration. Expecting this particular agreement to hold is madness.

openplatypus• 1 year ago

We are ready. Whole built infrastructure on EU or European (Swiss) cloud. And I mean all. Server, customer data, but also support infra, email, documents, etc.

We build Wide Angle Analytics ground up outside of US systems.

pessimizer2• 1 year ago

On Trump's part this is probably just part of a public trade negotiation, so it's true; Europe should be hosting its own data and its own data processing. They just won't because it means a lot of short term pain for extremely dubious long term gain.

The PCLOB is obviously theater that gives Europe an excuse to pretend that it has an independent data policy focused on protecting Europeans, because:

1) The US will go through European data if it wants, and happily and quietly break its own laws to do it, board or no board.

2) Europeans want even heavier surveillance of European data than the US does.

3) I'm sure Europe is happy to use the US to get around its own privacy laws.

The reason Trump is breaking the board is because that will by law create a necessity for Europeans to move data out of the US, which again would be a nightmare of dubious benefit. In return for not breaking the board, Trump will ask for unrelated concessions that are a lot less expensive than that. Europe will have choices to make.

Privacywise, the US will have access to European data no matter where it is stored, no matter what it needs to do to get that access. It has nothing to lose on that front, only the income (which is imagine is not huge.) But without that board, Europeans have to choose between either onshoring or leaving the data in the US even with no working deal in place (and ending the elaborate pr charade that they care about the privacy of Europeans.) That board is a gift to Europe.

siliconc0w• 1 year ago

You have as much sovereignty over a foreign-run cloud as you do over a Tesla or an Iphone. AWS or Google isn't going to give you the source to their software, and even if it did you don't have the engineering resources to review even a snapshot much less review it at the velocity it changes (and even if you wanted to try you'd need to hire the engineers away from the US tech companies).

n0id34• 1 year ago

It's like the world is slowly realising "wait, why don't we just become self-sufficient as much as we can" which is what every country should be focusing on from the get go. No brainer. You never want the power switch in someone else's hands.

pokstad• 1 year ago

If only that same attitude would spread to consumers to fuel a new self-hosting renaissance.

shirro• 1 year ago

It is a rarity to see any organization that self hosts email or uses a domestic provider any more. It is all foreign controlled now (specifically Microsoft). It should be examined by regulators everywhere both as a monopoly and a sovereign threat. The move to US services started long before the current political situation and will still be a threat to sovereignty long after the current US exec is gone. The frustrating thing is email services like many cloud services are highly substitutable and can easily be built on open source infrastructure.

serf• 1 year ago

Let me preface this by saying : I don't really like Trump, by why are people suddenly listening to his self-ascribed titles?

In 2016 he was the 'King of Debt' , a title he ascribed while talking about the debts he inherited from the previous administration, no one thought to start worrying about the start of a new monarchy then -- why now? because he's faster and looser with exec orders? hopefully everyone remembers 'king Bush Jr.' then.

Personally I think it's kind of hilarious to watch; on one hand you have mega-corps moving away from places TO America so that they can facilitate E2E, while simultaneously the persona-in-charge at the moment is driving people to any of the countries that have a long history of demanding keys and throwing a fit when denied.

Unless of course this article is about moving our data and software development to the Slovenia .. but it's not.

I think it's great to work towards not being beholden by other countries actions, but it should've had effort towards it before a bad-actor nudged everyone awake; not during the crisis. It shouldn't have taken Trump to remind everyone that nationalization of important goods is sound strategy.

pcj-github• 1 year ago

It's not just US clouds, all USA brands are toxic now. Buy elsewhere so our economy collapses. Seriously. You're doing us a favor. We need something drastic to wake up the 77M brain-dead people here that voted for this monstrosity.

d0gsg0w00f2• 1 year ago

I'm sorry that you feel so isolated from the majority.

What powerful force do you think caused over half the people you know to be so misguided?

midasz3• 1 year ago

propaganda

int_19h9• 1 year ago

25 years ago, my country of birth voted fair and square for a man who promised to end the dark times and return them to days of glory with a strong hand. His name was Vladimir Putin.

Back then, the powerful force was resentment, and honestly, they had good objective reasons to feel that way, too, given how the 90s were in Russia. It didn't make their choice any less misguided, though.

2024 in US felt familiar.

Sparkyte3• 1 year ago

It's true that relying solely on a cloud ecosystem without continuous protections isn't safe. That's why many government agencies should consider what I classify as a co-location strategy. By implementing this approach, agencies can use private tunneling applications with encryption and APIs to securely fetch non-sensitive information.

The cloud provider—such as AWS—can still be used for application hosting, but a private network should be established between the cloud environment and the co-location facility.

Why is this beneficial?

In a cloud environment, public ingress can be cut off instantly if needed, minimizing exposure.

Applications can be designed to serve most (or all) of their data through regional gateways connected to the co-location.

By placing co-location facilities close to critical data sources, latency is reduced while ensuring data remains protected and accessible within a secure network.

This approach allows organizations to balance cloud scalability with enhanced security, ensuring critical data remains under strict control while applications remain flexible and resilient.

stego-tech3• 1 year ago

Good to see this attitude becoming increasingly prevalent. I'm used to being a Cassandra in IT world, and while I'd have greatly preferred being wrong in my 2019 research concerns about data sovereignty, cloud-repatriation, vendor lock-in, and a shifting geopolitical landscape, welp, here we are anyway. I cut my teeth in data center operations and defense contracting, and knew immediately the real cost of public cloud would be the forfeiture of sovereignty to whichever country (and companies) controlled the major providers - surprise surprise, I was right. The solution was never to outsource core government infrastructure to a third party, but to build it in house and recruit the talent needed to keep it running, something easily done on most developed governments' budgets; by outsourcing to public cloud service providers, they traded national sovereignty for empty promises.

Bookmark this comment, because my read is that in five years' time the question won't be whether or not public cloud providers can be trusted, but how to engineer infrastructure on cloud providers you cannot trust. How do you encrypt storage on a cloud platform when you can't trust the vendor's tooling to secure your keys? How do you orchestrate K8s clusters in a provider who knowingly gives a hostile foreign government access to your etcd or network layer? How do you handle data boundaries within your own org when multiple countries with competing standards demand residency of data and infrastructure? I worry it'll be the "Chinese Firewall" problem but on a global scale, as different regions carve out their own digital kingdoms and demand fealty or expulsion.

JFingleton• 1 year ago

Perhaps Homomorphic encryption can provide part of the solution in running services on untrusted Cloud platforms?

Although with Microsoft's recent breakthrough in their quantum processor, I'm not sure whether quantum will be a help or a hindrance.

cudgy• 1 year ago

Why has it taken this author so long to finally realize this? It was never “safe” to have government data managed and stored in another country.

Sounds more like they just don’t like the current administration in the United States. This dislike somehow has woken them up to the reality that storing their sensitive data in another country was never a good idea.

templeOSdotcom2• 1 year ago

This sort of thing makes me groan. Oh, now it is a problem. It wasn't an issue with Obama and Biden but it suddenly is an issue that chester cheeto is running the show.

It is no secret to anyone that Google, Reddit, Meta, Microsoft, Intel, Twitter and Amazon work closely with the three letter agencies in the US.

jari_mustonen• 1 year ago

This has been common sense for a long time.

It's funny that people only raise this issue because of Donald Trump, whom the article refers to as "King," no less. The previous administration's green-lighting of the largest-ever industrial sabotage against Europe did not raise an eyebrow, but NBC News, a political opponent of Trump, claiming that Trump is "branding himself as a monarch" does the trick.

Oh well, whatever it takes.

JimBlackwood• 1 year ago

As a DevOps’er in the EU, how would I capitalize on this?

I’ve only ever done bare metal and have been lucky all of my employers hated the idea of AWS/Azure/GCP. So I feel like I’m quite well positioned to start helping companies move to bare metal alternatives.

Do I start freelancing, or do I try for an AWS alternative?

bedatadriven• 1 year ago

I've been looking at this a lot, for ourselves (multitenant saas app running on gcp) and for our customers, who are starting to be curious about something between fully self-managed (too costly) and centralized/multi-tenant/american cloud.

One thing that strikes me is the relationship with architecture. A monolithic, vertically scaled app can run ANYWHERE where I can rent a VM, whether in Norway with Upcloud or on a VPS in Kenya. It's only when you start stitching together managed DBs with autoscaled instance pools etc that vendor lock in begins.

All of these nice toys make our service highly available. But while the overall risk is lower, it is far more correlated between customers. If our service would go down because of a political event, it would go down for all our customers at once.

What about a control plane that manages a fleet of per-customer VMs across an array of cloud providers? Has anyone ever tried this?

_blk• 1 year ago

I'm not convinced that the answer is renting rackspace at the local MS datacenter..

Now please don't use that as an excuse to get on alibaba's rack.

amai3• 1 year ago

People will only act on that, if Elon Musk buys Microsoft. But then it is too late.

lazzlazzlazz3• 1 year ago

Europe is going down an incredibly dark path. Political censorship, encryption bans, and absurd consumer "protection" laws (e.g., like those limiting AI rollouts) mean Europeans are becoming second class globally. The irony of this post is that it is no longer safe for Europeans to rely on a European cloud.

amai3• 1 year ago

Despite these problems Europe is still the better place to live in compared to "global leaders" like USA, Russia or China. Because limiting AI rollouts is not really relevant for your quality of live, social security, health, safety, sanity etc.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

amai3• 1 year ago

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

Related Stories