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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
That’s a cute pithy statement, but it’s not particularly relevant.
For example, Hetzner doesn’t even offer database services. Some would consider those to be table stakes to run their application. Does it add complexity? Potentially. But we accept some additional complexity if it yields incremental value.
If you don’t value the additional functionality cloud providers offer, that’s fine. But lots of people do.
Certainly, unnecessary complexity should be avoided. But it’s a bit naive to associate comprehensiveness with complexity. They’re not entirely identical.
> For example, Hetzner doesn’t even offer database services.
I am totally OK setting up my own database software on Hetzner. I understand that some people are used to "cloud" spoon-feeding them what they need and even what they really don't, but I perceive this as a nuisance.
What you call “spoon feeding” is what another calls “value adding.” Additional security, automated failover, automated backups, and automated version upgrades are key features, and a lot of people value them. It often means their customers don’t have to hire expensive domain experts (or can hire fewer of them) and can instead focus their resources on more direct value creation.
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#?
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.
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.
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.
As a point of fact, China is not, in fact, a fascist dictatorship. North Korea is not a fascist dictatorship either. Neither is or was Cuba, or medieval kingdoms with actual kings and warlords.
Fascism is a right-wing ideology was widespread throughout all of Europe before WWII, and especially took hold in Germany, Austria, and Italy. It was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from e.g. Stalinist Russia.
It is not a synonym for "bad government," "dictatorship," "violent government," or similar.
I agree that it is important to use the word fascist accurately, but it is also not not as well defined as you say. There is a reasonable case for calling China fascist. It has a cult of personality, state control of the economy, nationalism, racism, elimination of minority cultures. It is far more like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s than it is like Stalinist Russia.
All of those apply to Ancient Egypt too, only more so.
I did not give a definition for fascism. You can look ones up yourself. However, critically:
1. China is not right-wing. That's prerequisite.
2. China has very little fascist-style state / political violence, and virtually no paramilitary elements. You're at no risk of being beaten up or having your windows broken for having the wrong political views. Police officers didn't even have guns until recently. There aren't Brown Shirts and Black Shirts, are groups like the fascist right-wing militias in the US. Rather, the state violence you see there is institutionalized violence, through proper administrative and bureaucratic channels.
3. China has nationalism, but is very much not ultra-nationalist.
4. China does not try to eliminate minorities if they play ball. Indeed, China is very supportive of non-Han groups (who were, e.g. exempt from One Child). Rather, what you see is forceful "modernization" and cultural assimilation, leading up to violence if there isn't compliance. If the Muslim minorities in China decided to give up their religion, culture, and desire for freedom, and started to act like Han Chinese, they'd almost certainly be left alone. You saw the same directed at Han during the Great Leap Forward. For Jews in 1930 Germany, assimilating was very much not enough to be left alone.
5. Control of the economy is limited and directed. A lot of the Chinese economy is also like the Wild West.
.... and so on.
Note that I'm not passing a value judgment on which system of government is better or worse. However, "fascist" is not the same as "totalitarian."
One of the key things in China is that if you (personally and collectively) go along with the government, for the most part, you're very safe, and life is quite peaceful. Another is that most control is "soft." The wrong post online will simply be hard to find, load slowly, or not show up for other users. Or you'll have a harder time moving up in life.
It's very little like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s, where you had armed groups walking the streets, breaking windows.
Define right wing in this context. Its historically communist, but it not really so any more, as you your self admit "Control of the economy is limited and directed"
> China has nationalism, but is very much not ultra-nationalist.
It is very nationalist and believes its culture to be superior to minority culture which is why they are assimilating it.
> For Jews in 1930 Germany, assimilating was very much not enough to be left alone.
True, but I said "fascism" not "nazism" which are not the same thing.
> Rather, the state violence you see there is institutionalized violence, through proper administrative and bureaucratic channels.
is that a necessary trait? The Brownshirts were got rid of once the Nazis were in power. Once you control the state you no longer need the paramilitary.
> However, "fascist" is not the same as "totalitarian."
I agree, but I think China has a lot of traits in common with fascist states. it might not tick all the boxes in a definition, but it ticks far more than the typical dictatorship.
> I think China has a lot of traits in common with fascist states. it might not tick all the boxes in a definition, but it ticks far more than the typical dictatorship.
It's very hard for me to see how. Even taking everything you said about China at face value (some of which I might take issue with):
- Almost every dictator tries (with mixed success) to create a personality cult.
- Almost every totalitarian state tries to build nationalist fervor to keep people in-line
- Almost every totalitarian state uses state violence to maintain control
- Almost every culture believes itself to be superior, and most successful politician try to exploit that (with the exception of a few on the far left)
... and so on.
I think a necessary and requisite element for fascism is an army of thugs and a pervasive level of fear. That's different from, for example, an army of educated bureaucrats deciding to stick problem individuals in a gulag. The brownshirts were never gotten rid of, but rather were institutionalized into the SA and to some extent, the SS. They were still thugs and relatively indiscriminate violence.
China lacks thugs. If you don't stick your head up, I don't see many people fear the government. People generally keep their heads down, fall in line, and lead normal lives.
I don't know if it's core to fascism, but expansionism and imperialism is also rather lacking in China. There are some disputes, mind, you, about places which China thinks should belong, namely Tibet, Taiwan, Mongolia, a little bit of Russia (formerly Manchuria), a few mountains near India, and a few islands, but critically, those ambitions have not changed in nearly a century.
I would actually argue that China is closer to national socialism rather than fascism precisely because Han nationalism is such a strong element of their ideology. Pure fascism is "state above all", while CCP I think sees the state as more of instrument, a necessary means to another end, more like the Nazis. The difference with the latter is that they are pragmatic national socialists rather than the more rabid Hitlerite variety (which is also why their nationalism isn't so blatantly racial).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was true for Trump 1. This time round, things appear to have changed. The CEOs of these companies sitting front-row at the inauguration is the most visible sign of their newfound mutual love. MAGA have found out these companies will just bend to their ideological will in the interest of shareholder value and it shows.
Maybe in future, but for now these companies are not liked in MAGA-land, and simply attending the inauguration of a president hasn’t really changed anything.
Not just for Trump 1. It was true right up until January 1 of this year. Their "conversion" just started and it remains to be seen whether there is any depth to it or it's a publicity stunt to avoid Trump's ire over the next 4 years.
Three of them (AGA) had tech bosses at prime seats at the inauguration. MAGA might hate them, but the Musk, Thiel, etc. crowd that seem to be in control of the While House are big tech. MAGA was only for the MAGA electorate to get into power. Sadly poor/angry voters will happily vote against their own interests if you can make them hate (immigrants, liberals, DEI, woke, whatever does the job).
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.
Russia struggles as well. habr.ru is full of stories about rebranded western software and hardware sold at exorbitant prices with fake certificate of local produce )
Some open source projects are rebranded as Russian with minimal changes, that happens, yes, but that's the result of gaming the system that incentivizes development of Russian software, not the result of sanctions.
Russian replacements of Office 365 and Google Docs seem to be doing well.
As for hardware, the EU is not yet under American sanctions.
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.
What Microsoft might end up doing is following the China model, essentially giving control over their EU servers (probably only those in a special region) to an EU company, while still supplying the software and taking a (very large) cut of the profits.
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."
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.
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.
If you look at other countries/regions that impose high tariffs, their companies continue to buy and use American technologies and absorb the cost (to their local customers' detriment).
I'd certainly enjoy the case studies of European enterprises jumping from full-scale Azure and AWS deployments to OVHcloud or Hetzner, though. That'd make for some interesting reading.
But what if they outright ban it, as the US was going to do with TikTok (for national security reasons)? This it the tech services version of Nord Stream.
It's not really workable. The real-world impact of a TikTok ban, even if it outright stopped working on every American device overnight is pretty minimal; people stop watching videos, and some influencers lose their jobs.
If my (Canadian) government decides to ban Azure in a year, my critical infrastructure company ignores it for 11 months because they figure it won't actually happen, and then goes to the government to tell them that if the ban actually goes through, our infrastructure stops working because we'd actually need a multi-year timeframe to migrate off of Azure.
The EU’s problem is that it doesn’t foster company growth on any level and doesn’t help with problems specific to the EU (e.g. multiple languages, differing laws, varying levels of unionization, and more).
Blaming Trump for their own well-known problems is silly. They were dependent on the US before him and they will continue to be dependent on the US after him until they look in the mirror and decide to fix what is broken.
Tariffs don’t really work for software, especially if the software provider holds lots of foreign government contracts, and you assume the foreign government and provider are colluding to get control over your systems.
Everyone knows spinning things up is a piece of piss. It's the on-going maintenance and economies of scale that aren't. Not to mention migration, compliance, etc
Oh, you mean like Spotify? Or those thousands of Mittelstand companies across Europe that Americans don't know about but are actually used in Europe?
But the argument of the parent might be that a very active open source community based in Europe points towards a big potential of experienced developers working at their mid sized companies in the shadow of American big tech. Once big tech is gone...
As a UK based engineer, I wish. I cannot for the life of me even get an interview, maybe first level HR interview for US companies. Meanwhile when applying for UK jobs, no problem.
Don't know what it is. Am I not fake enough? Not forcing fake smiles and excluding obnoxious positivity constantly? Not ego stroking the interviewer? Am I doomed to, in comparison to US, poverty wages?
I'm not sure if you've misunderstood, so apologies if this is old news. US companies may have teams of engineers in various other countries. But they almost always pay local market rate. In much the same way US companies will pay teams in India their local market rate (which is less again).
My last company paid 2-2.5x a UK salary for a US engineer. Perhaps the ratio for a company like Meta is closer, but I doubt it's equal. For startups you may find random roles that have equal pay globally, but they're relatively uncommon.
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?)
If Microsoft is providing EU data sovereignty, then they’re either in violation of US law (the US CLOUD Act, specifically) or do not have the technical capability to access data on those servers. (So, for instance, the machines could be air gapped, or they could be configured to never honor MS credentials, including on the software update path).
In practice, this means no US cloud providers provide foreign data sovereignty (though many claim to).
The CLOUD Act is incompatible with basic data protection rights.
As long as whatever sham of a data protection agency was nominally functional in the US european elites could convince themselves that it was legal to transfer personal data to some US corporations, but now that agency is defunct.
But yeah, it's a bad idea to do business with empires. Sooner or later they turn to bullying and extortion.
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.
> 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.
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.
But the more important point was that they started branding themselves as a cloud vendor 4 years ago, and investing in new offerings around that pitch, but it’s taking them far too long to release basic parts of the offering, and they’re falling behind.
the real point is not ipv6 (or this or that specific service). the point is the attitude.
anybody in this subthread bikeshedding what aws service supports what version of the ip protocol has missed the point and would probably fail a text comprehension test.
Nobody missed the point. The examples of AWS after 15 years still being dragged into full IPv6, is to show the lack of support for IPv6, is not the lack of technical awareness that is trying to be demonstrated.
Depending on the context, and granted, lacking some of the subtle details missing in the interaction described, might actually show real experience in the field.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
And they are going to stay there once the megalomaniac in chief and his South African oligarch have gone with their wrecking ball through the very fabric of the US society and economy?
My local European ISP provided me /64 IPv6 addresses since at least 2020 and had so called sticky IPv4 addresses since at last 1999. They were sticky because they did not change for years if the box was connected within 15 min.
This was possible because motivated individuals held technical positions in the ISP while the management has been totally incompetent and was later jugged outright corrupt.
Because of corrupt management and public scandals, my ISP has been sold to Orange. I am afraid this will end the 25 years of technical excellence as well.
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.
You know, if we were really adversarial, it would be really really wise to reconsider allowing German planes, whether home built or bought from the US, "loaner" nuclear weapons to carry into battle.
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.
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.
Not if the US becomes more and more adversarial, especially if they jeopardize NATO. The current administration already acts almost like an enemy of Europe, it's quite baffling. Politicians have to justify military expenses to the voters.
What drones are you going to get for $10 each (now or in the future)? How are they “unstoppable”? How are you going to deploy millions of $10 drones on the battlefield without tons of $100M platforms that can survive AA defenses long enough to get to the engagement? How much range do you think $10 of batteries even gets you?
I can today assemble a drone from parts from Alipay and program the firmware in an esp32 for ~ 20$. I am not kidding, Google it.
That is without me manufacturing any of the components. If one had a nation state backing I am confident it can be done for a fraction of it.
They are unstoppable because if you have a tank and there is a swarm of 500 of them what do you aim? One of them will find the opening to drop the grenade on your tanks weak spot. These are all single use kamikaze drones.
Same for battery range. Europe is preparing for a defensive war on their land. Even 10 miles of ranges should suffice. You can always deploy them from a mothership.
You’re massively underestimating what it takes to get from an esp32 hobbyist drone to a weaponized drone with 10 mile range and an actual explosive payload capable of taking out armor (in any number). Or the sensor package it would take to make them useful against personnel. Let alone deploying ten million of them in a real war.
And you’re entirely ignoring the very real problem of the mothership which has to survive to get within ten miles of the battlefield, unless you’re planning on releasing them from box trucks which means their range will either be useless or they’ll get taken out by bigger, more expensive loitering drones the second they’re spotted. War is antagonistic co-evolution in its purest form, these naive solutions dont last very long which is why our weapons cost so much (for everyone, not just the west).
When you spread the risk across 10M units you are better off compared to placing all of your bets in one super fancy unit. Remember in the Ukrainian war, Russia took out most of the Ukrainian planes in their hangars, before even they took off.
I totally agree with you that drone swarms is not a silver bullet, and likely some effective adversarial strategy will be developed(jamming, attacking motherships etc), but the point is that airplanes are not as important as they were in the past. Ukraine is still standing with no real air presence.
The battlefields in Ukraine is how we know the real cost of those drones - they managed to push it down to around $300/unit for FPV ones, which are the primary armor killers.
Many of the physical parts are manufactured in Europe under license. I've never heard of this as a major concern.
The main point of conflict is that the US holds the source code for the advanced software systems very closely, no partner country has access. A lot of the differentiated and exotic capabilities of the F-35 that make it attractive to other countries are in the software, everyone recognizes this. There are many algorithms and techniques that rely on classified computer science to deliver qualitative advantages. Even if other countries could replicate the hardware, without replicating the software anything they built would be a pale shadow of the F-35 in terms of capability, which makes alternative hardware much less compelling.
The US knows all the leverage is in the software, so that is the part they strictly control. It is yet another case of the software eating the world, military systems edition.
The US has a bunch of (classified) tech to make reverse engineering unusually difficult. It is also several million lines of complex code. Different countries have different builds of the software, with some features missing, degraded, or disabled. There are also regular capability upgrades with new software versions; the production versions of some software features are roadmap items still under development.
I suspect that by the time anyone was able to successfully reverse engineer it, it would be semi-obsolete, which limits the value in doing so. Playing catch-up requires taking a lot of aggressive R&D risks that European governments have traditionally been very uncomfortable with or which take far too long to execute.
That's interesting. I'd have assume the secret sauces were in the radar and targeting systems.
Maybe the source code also contains a secret kill switch? I'd definitely put one in if I was selling fighter planes to 3rd parties. Alliances can switch overnight, as we're seeing right now.
IIRC the French refused to give the UK the means to disable Argentina's Exocets during the Falklands War.
They would lose access to lots of tech for example top radar tech which is designed (and I think built) in Europe as well as lithography machines. We'll sell the latter to China instead of the US if they try to play those games.
My country bought the F-35 for the sole purpose of being a deterrent to a future Russian invasion. Now that the US and Russia are allies, how can we trust that those planes will receive spare parts and other support during a conflict?
I think European alternatives for F35 are obviously needed.
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.
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.
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)
Well, I'm all for the return of the classic forum experience!
The UK's largest "social" sites are pretty much forums (e.g. Mumsnet, The Student Room, DigitalSpy, MoneySavingExpert) and while they're good for their respective topics, they don't cover the Reddit/Facebook/Instagram use cases (they could be arguably considered on a par with individual sub-reddits).
Well, I'm all for the return of the classic forum experience!
If you make each individual bulletin board receive broadcasts from a central server, then you get the network effects of Facebook and Reddit. Individual boards can just sub to the central server keeping them connected to the hivemind or not. Your community can remain isolated or throttled (only 30% of global updates get through). We do this manually here, where not all global posts get through (you'd be hard pressed to push a Reddit post to the top here). It's the simplest way to federate using existing technology.
This model is already at play. X, Bluesky, Reddit, Truth Social, and Rumble are basically heavily funded private message boards with a large mindshare subscriber base.
Taking our message boards back is proving to be difficult, especially because trying to move the userbase off of it is the same as trying to move people off drugs.
> If you make each individual bulletin board receive broadcasts from a central server
Your're doing this with phpBB? Doesn't happen to be open-source somewhere?
Would be interesting to have a look, I think I a bit like this opt-in partial federation / hivemind. Would be even more interesting if it was possible to sync comments between such forums.
**
Developing forum software myself, Talkyard. Based in Europe (Sweden).
Started thinking even more about using some European cloud, as an option. There's a Swedish hosting provider that looks interesting (I think)
I guess you could do syncing kind of like how CCing email is done. CC my home server and global server. This gives you agency to remain detached from the hivemind, and vice versa. This is not some idea out of left field, it's roughly my workflow between Reddit or HN or other sites. I manually do the filtering in my mind when I move through different channels.
Phpbb is open source, but I mostly brought it up to show that Facebook is just that, and nothing more. Forking Reddit will also give you a Facebook clone (and a Reddit clone).
I was wondering if you're using a phpBB extension you've built yourself, and if it's on GitHub or somewhere (the extension), or ... It's not a built-in feature?
Websearched for "phpBB federation" and "phpbb subscribe rss broadcasts", found this:
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.
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.
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.
I think the language problem will become less of a problem in the future due to (1) more (young) people living in citys and (2) all young people in cities speaking english. At least compared to previous generations imo. This could be my subjective view based on luxembourg, netherlands, and visiting other european cities.
Don't overestimate "young people speaking english" especially with current demography you still need to tap ones that are excluded from English as there will be much more of those.
I do see opportunities with LLMs as making all kind of platforms language agnostic - you should be able to write your own language and read your own language even if other person is from different country using different language.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not just Trump but any potential future administration. We’re no longer reliable partners who can keep continuity of our bureaucracy and foreign policy going for longer than four years without a geopolitical seizure.
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.
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.
"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.
I know what Cloud is, and OVH has a cloud, with many of the same services as AWS. Even Bunny can be configured via terraform. So the reality today is that AWS and other cloud offerings have strong alternatives, but Office and Github don't.
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.
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?
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).
Yes. I agree. But the difference is making them be an adversary, which can be dealt with, versus handing it them willingly. There is a difference there.
I know I'll get downvoted for this, but it seems like telling the truth is now a downvote-worthy offense on Hacker News. I thought we had become more open-minded, especially with the new sheriff in town.
Arguably 4G networks were developed in Europe and they are widely used.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. I live with a high living standard with access to good health care. Hey, I also live in a democracy, and you're right that I think we need to defend that well. Let's hope & see if we have what it takes..
And most of the world doesn't run on fancy new gizmos (that don't make money for the shareholders anyway). Europe is still rich because it produces high value items like steel from iron ore, and machines and cars from steel.
They are both German citizens instead of showing false national pride you should think about why you had an astronomical brain drain over the last 20 years.
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.
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.
When I last looked into it, the compute overhead was very high, such that (for the tasks I was looking at) it seemed significantly cheaper to handle everything on-premises with trusted hardware than remotely on untrusted hardware.
To be clear, this was 10 years ago so things may have changed. Also, my task was memory bandwidth limited, where even changing the memory access patterns slowed things down by 10% or more.
If China and Russia can somehow solve the issue and manage their infra, I don't see why EU, for example, can't.
It's better to have at least partially protected your whole government and citizens data than having it handed directly to the foreign intelligence in bulk. That's the question about political will, we don't talk about average Joe here.
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.
There are plenty of charts based on public budgets, you can pick your favorite. How shall we judge whether transparency is improved? What if all of this results in less transparency?
Your question can be answered without giving away control and access to unauthorised and inexperienced auditors.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance has been missing. Too many decades of nepotism, insider trading, corruption ( starting with lobbying ), have led to the lack of transparency. The movie “The Big Short” has explained some of these issues.
I believe the audit stuff is overblown [1], there are strict requirements for passing and it doesn’t mean the money is literally disappearing into a black hole. I don’t have every Chipotle receipt saved in the past year but that doesn’t mean my spending is mysterious. I assume that’s why being audited by the IRS is considered a nightmare, it’s nontrivial.
It seems the Pentagon audit process only started in 2018, and Congress gave a deadline of 2028 to pass a fully clean audit, which they have made progress on:
> Of the 28 military agencies, DoD leaders think 11 are expected to receive clean audit opinions, one more than the previous fiscal year.
I'm very sure that there is a lot of spending that is used inefficiently. Any large organization does run into that problem. Resolving some issues, cutting red tape, making processes more efficient, all that is probably a good idea. However, "DOGE" and those cheering them on have not produced any evidence for the vast majority of the claims they made. Often they also just misrepresented facts (e.g., USAID supposedly funding media sites, condoms in Gaza and many other nonsense) or simply lied. I also don't see much promotion of actual nuanced views on the topic like the Hamilton Project's tracker of federal expenditures which you can find here: https://www.hamiltonproject.org/data/tracking-federal-expend...
At the moment, the US government seems to be mainly focused on causing headlines to make their base happy who want quick victories and have not shown resilience to simplistic takes, and - of course - to make the opposition party and their supporters panic.
And what qualities of an audit would you trust from a department that acts like that? They’re not, for example, combining all prior audits into a sophisticated longitudinal audit research tool. They’ve prepared their conclusions to hold even if they misplace three orders of magnitude.
Don't mistake obliviousness for a conspiracy. The vast majority of the doge savings link straight to the Federal Procurement Data System that anyone can search or ingest from. You're of course free to disagree with the spending but if you weren't even aware you could look at these contracts then maybe you should ask if you're being shown the whole picture or if it's closer to a politically motivated hit job on our civil servants.
And one could peruse that under any administration. The challenge for an honest DOGE is that they must do better than 100% of past Federal efficiency policy, which is maybe a hundred incremental changes[0]. If they cause _any_ problems that those fixed, then they’re at best not up to the job and maybe even deserving cynicism.
You do realize that whataboutisms don't actually prove your point? Implicitly you're saying that what Hillary did was wrong, but now that my guy is doing it, it's ok, since Hillary did it. You can't have it both ways. You either believe something is wrong, or it's not. To argue both sides usually means a bad faith attempt at pushing a narrative.
I see Americans defending Trumps and Musk. Or acting as if everyone just overreacted. So I would say, quite a lot of Americans are either fine with this or actively want it.
There are 300M people here and Trump won by ~200K. You can safely say that some are fine with this administrations behavior, but many are not and starting to actively protest and resist. Both are true simultaneously.
I heard a meaningful quiet after the H1B fight. The kind of guys who said “kick em out! Imma get me one of them high-pay tech jobs” Those guys had to watch Trump, revealed to employ a lot of H1-class workers, claim we need more.
The very fact that it's even possible to have this kind of thing happening unfettered, unconstrained, and unaccountable is evidence in and of itself that the US Govt. doesn't take its national security & secrets seriously though, isn't it?
In that taking those things seriously would have included:
* More creative threat-modeling.
* More effective prevention measures.
* More vigorous mitigation & stonewalling attempts.
* More rapid remediation & rejection of the intrusion.
Especially for a threat vector that was telegraphed so openly so far in advance. The circumstances might be unprecedented, but they're not at all surprising.
What sort of threat modeling would have prevented this?
There are plenty of mitigation and stonewalling going on, but mostly through the courts.
Executives must have some power, or else the process itself becomes the executive and there's no ability to respond to anything.
If there's anybody to blame, we must place the blame on the executive wielding the power, and those who have enabled this to happen by putting that particular executive in power by subverting the traditional vetting process. If a political party no longer performs basic vetting of that level then the entire party should probably be eliminated.
It was well known that this was exactly what Musk would do, by anyone paying the slightest shred of attention to what was going on.
He said it was what he was going to do, he was up on the stage, I heard many many people salivating for DOGE cuts like this before the election, and even today.
> It was well known that this was exactly what Musk would do, by anyone paying the slightest shred of attention to what was going on.
I agree, and frankly anyone feeling "surprised" right now probably still thinks strongly worded emails and letters are enough to solve the problems they're just now seeing. Those things rely on a stable democracy where constituents and what happens to them matter at all.
> anyone feeling "surprised" right now probably still thinks strongly worded emails and letters are enough
No, it’s completely different than that. Some of them I’ve talked to, they’re confused about this Musk Internet guy. And they’re confused why their news isn’t giving them the predictive edge those aware of Project 2025 seem to have in conversation. “I guess we’ll see…” “I guess we’ll have to have hope…” The same people willing to accept fabulist conspiracy theories for non-white-male candidates now openly rely on faith-based appeals about the character of the richest man in the world.
I don't think we disagree. I'm just saying they're so far behind that they're not useful; the republic is already gone. What we're talking in is the shell of it.
Musk buying Twitter and then spending millions to buy votes in PA weeks before the election seemed pretty obvious.
People like him don't spend without an expectation of something in return.
The more surprising thing is the amount of people who think successful capitalist = successful political leader, when the incentives and constituencies are drastically different.
On the contrary this is exactly what they said they'd do if elected. This is exactly what was voted for. Don't pretend like Americans didn't have agency in the destruction of their own country.
This is a good point. Aside from the objectively unavoidable and nigh-uncountable deluge of articles, opeds, social media posts, video news segments and direct statements from the candidate and his representatives describing exactly what they intended to do and a 927 page document detailing the plan that was released two and a half years before the election, what warning did anybody have?
The polls are starting to agree with you. Trump’s actions are extremely unpopular, and support from his base is eroding:
> In the CNN poll, Musk having a prominent role in the administration is viewed as a “bad thing” (54-28) by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio. The Post-Ipsos poll showed Americans disapprove by a similarly wide margin (52-26) of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary.”
> And Americans said 63 to 34 that they are concerned about Musk’s team getting access to their data, which is the subject of high-profile legal fights.
> Even 37 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they are at least “somewhat” concerned about Musk getting their data.
You can't post like this here. Since this account has been doing it repeatedly, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
Were you this afraid of the propaganda machinery when it was aimed at conservatives? It seems far less radicalized now then it was. Just now other voices are actually allowed.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
“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.
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
You're assuming the people who handle it for the government weren't working at Amazon and Microsoft a year ago, and won't again be working for Amazon and Microsoft a year from now.
The government doesn't have leverage. The government is Amazon and Microsoft's leverage against others.
It's not just the corporations as a whole that are an issue. It increases the insider risk footprint of that data to include your cloud provider's employees as well as your own. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google almost certainly employ agents of your adversaries (including US agents working without their knowledge) who have weird attack vectors and now have to be part of your threat model.
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.
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.
> 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.
If a country's citizens want to give away their data, it's well within their right to do so. At most, the U.S. Government should educate about it, much like tobacco dangers.
Having that said, U.S. citizens with clearance and/or government employees should be subject to data loss prevention measures, like they already do[0].
I'd be forward for a ban if it was an issue of public mental health, but the U.S. Government cannot take that angle because they'd have to kill Meta Platforms as well. They know they can't, Meta lobbyists will not allow that.
But restricting TikTok based on data control and free speech liberties, that's overreaching. I've already seen TikTok videos of people saying they'd stamp their U.S. passport on the forehead and give it to Chinese ByteDance rather than use Instagram. It is well within their rights to do so if they so desire.
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!
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.
According to the very link you posted, the US was two whole centuries late to the party. Better late than never of course, but the spin of trying to then frame it as an American Victory(tm) is pretty ridiculous.
“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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
Every war that the NATO countries somehow miraculously got involved in is an economic war for natural resources and control, and the big EU countries always take their share of the pie.
Ukraine’s resources, one way or another, will be split up between Russia, EU, and the US (or more precisely it will end up in the hands of the oligarchs and “black rocks” of these countries).
I most certainly did not say who Ukraine's resources belong to, I'm saying that I predict that no matter how and when the war ends, I'm afraid the country's resources will be split up between the superpowers. It's not what I want, not what I advocate for, it's just what I foresee happening.
Of course? How is that even in question. The US promised protection to Ukraine for giving up its nuclear weapons, then freely gave much aid as it was in its mown interests to do so.
You mean the EU's war in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan which resulted in EU companies such as Exxon Mobile getting even richer off of the oil contracts?
Sorry I mean American's wars, not the EU's wars. The EU hasn't really done resource wars since the colonial times.
> 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.
That was the security guarantee: having the presence of US mining companies there. Honestly, I don't really think US really needs Ukraine's mineral resources. US has plenty of its own to extract. But it was a pretext to invest and increase US presence there.
At some point Ukraine will run out of men. As much as I want to, I don't see US troops deployed to Ukraine, maybe EU can send its troops? Biden said as much at the start of the war, too, and it's still true.
At this point I don't see a Ukrainian victory over Russia and going back to 1992 borders. They will have to give a lot of things up and the longer it waits, the worse its negotiate position will be.
OK. But Ukraine choses to keep figting. Let them decide their fate.
At the start of the war EVERYONE said Russia would take Ukraine in days, and asked Zelenskyy when he wanted to evacuate. Not sure why anything they said back then is worth while to base opinions on today.
> Not sure why anything they said back then is worth while to base opinions on today.
There is still a lot of that hope but it's also a different time. The bravery of of Ukrainians in the initial wave and the counter-offensive as unmatched. The West helped but it didn't help enough. It was always piece-mailing military equipment. With a lot of wait times and a lot of hand wringing. We gave them tanks, but no F16s at the time. We could given them AA weapons earlier and more of it. They also made mistakes, there is a decent amount of corruption, and fumbled on recruiting after those who wanted to fight joined they started sending vans with military dressed people to effectively kidnap men off the streets or their places of employment. That looks bad and make their own people fearful of the military and those men won't be fighting the same way as those who sign up voluntarily.
> OK. But Ukraine choses to keep figting. Let them decide their fate
Their fate was never really just their own after the initial resistance. Without the Western help they couldn't have lasted this long. The West both helped a lot, and not enough at the same time. It's like a friend needing life saving surgery and it costs $10k. We send him $8k. He should be very grateful for such a generous gift, but everyone knows that also won't be enough and he will likely die.
>Keep in mind it was Ukraine that proposed the idea of offering their resources back in October 2024[0]
The general idea, sure. They offered that in return for security guarantees or as collateral for continued military aid.
That is not what is being offered them by this administration. Instead the administration has chosen the mafia shakedown route. American military aid to Ukraine to date amounts to around $100 billion dollars (and we're not talking stacks of cash here but rather the "value" of military hardware, much of which already had an expiration date and was literally designed and built for the Russia-invades-Europe scenario). But Trump is demanding $500 million from Ukraine, and offering zero in return. As of today many concessions have been demanded from Ukraine, but zero concessions have been asked of Russia - much the opposite actually.
It's not zero in return, why would Ukraine agree to that? Where is your source that it was zero in return?
> and we're not talking stacks of cash here but rather the "value" of military hardware, much of which already had an expiration date and was literally designed and built for the Russia-invades-Europe scenario
That's not true at all, US has sent billions of financial aid[0]. Compare that to Europe's aid which was majority in the form of loans, which Europe gets to collect interest on based off of frozen Russian assets.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
Either one would agree that if the "MSM" were publishing bad things then there's a need to control it. At which point the question is why is a social media website different. Or you'd say that child porn and other bad things being published on websites are fine and there's no need to control things. At which point you'd be pretty wildly out of step with the majority of the population.
MSM are publishing bad things, freedom of speech is important and I don't think we need to "control" anything (child porn is illegal by any measure, it's an abuse issue, not a speech issue). I can't even imagine how you jumped to that conclusion. Just because I don't agree with something, it doesn't mean I'm ok with eliminating it through fascism.
You can't claim to support total free speech and also accept that there is content that is bad for society that needs to be controlled. The moment you accept the latter premise you then need to build enforcement mechanisms and have debates that boil down to political preferences on what constitutes bad. I think it's kind of a navel gazing gesture to just hand wave at "I support the good free speech' and wash your hands of any of the coercion/"fascism" that comes with how the sausage is made.
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.
I don't find USA to have meaningful speech protection. Retaliatory lawsuits are frequent and the process itself is and the process itself is the punishment.
Plus, current goverment don't care about laws and people on top of it have history of retaliating against speech.
It is still a lot better than the nothing that exists in EU as free speech. Also the current government does not care about laws and the previous did not want free speech, but in the end there is plenty of it.
Yet almost all US companies where users can publish stuff operate in EU just as well. Seems like the upside of the market size outweights the downside of risks.
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.
This is the kind of thing you don't have to contend with if you host outside of Europe. I don't care about your beef with Russia, I do care about free speech though.
It's indeed easy not to care about "our beef with Russia" when you're far away from them. The feeling is quite different when you live next to them, and know that your home might get bombed one day because of Putin's geopolitical fantasies you have absolutely no control over.
I like free speech, but I would rather not die because an army of Russian trolls managed to replace Western democratic governments with Russian puppets.
Just food for thought... I have a hard time viewing the people who want to restrict speech as my ally. Quite the opposite. I'll take so-called (likely fictional) "trolls" over restrictions of speech any day of the week.
I don't see why anybody would doubt the existence of those trolls. It's quite obvious that social media can be cheap and efficient tool for spreading propaganda, and information warfare / spreading propaganda among your enemies is nothing new. It's done by many nation states and other actors, Russia is just among the most successful.
Anyway, I tend to agree that "too much" freedom of speech is not the real issue here. Across Western world, neoliberal economic policy has failed to bring prosperity among large segments of population. Politicians have also ignored very real issues, such as failed humanitarian migration policies, DEI-policies which discriminate against particular "privileged" groups and so on. Trolls would have much lower success rate, and far right parties would be much smaller if these concerns had been taken seriously before by mainstream parties. People who are happy and optimistic about their lives and future rarely become extremists.
I find it ironic since your complaint about DEI almost certainly comes from the dreaded trolls you're referencing. I don't actually need a "troll" to tell me I don't want to spend billions of my tax dollars defending Europe when everywhere you look in the US things are falling apart. That's not Russia, it's just reality.
Online warfare is warfare, and russias lies can destabilize working democracies. We all know the stories of the horrors of the 2nd world war, and never again also means fighting online warfare. Freedom is more important than freedom of lies. I’m sure that if you ask people who experienced the 2nd world war to choose between freedom and freedom of lies, they’d choose freedom.
Also, a vote for the right is a vote to increase the gap between the poor and the wealthy, things will only get worse.
My own country lies to me far more than Russia could ever even dream it. The president of the US went on live tv and said he saw non-existent "beheaded babies" just to service Israel. Russia isn't even a blip of a problem for US citizens (other than the Ukraine stealing our tax dollars). In fact, a lot of people that want to take away our freedoms seem to be anti-Russia, so at worst they're the enemy of our enemy.
I don't vote "right" because the Democrats and the Republicans are both working against my interests.
As soon as citizens no longer trust their democratic government, democracy stops being effective. I the Netherlands I think the governments have done a pretty decent job (although far from perfect, but compared to other countries they’re top of class) and I trust that most people in government are trying to do the right thing. A lot of the online lies are aimed at creating this distrust so democracies stop working.
And that distrust starts with this dishonest framing like ‘ukrain are stealing our dollars’. No they’re not, it’s your politicians that decided it was in the interest of the US to have wars: fight hitler (thank you!), fight communism in Vietnam, fund and later fight saddam, fund and later fight taliban.
But now you have a government that no longer thinks fighting Putin is useful, because they think the Russian style of government is the way to go, and not a threat to the US way of life. I doubt they’re right, the average Russian in the country leads a very poor life, and freedom is not a priority in Russia, if you disagree with government you will get thrown out of a window.
But your government is now following the government style of Russia, not following the rules of law, not following democratic, constitutional rules. Do you really want to be next Russia?
As a citizen I support my government's decision to not fund the Ukraine. I never supported it, most people don't. It's common sense, why send our money halfway across the globe to fight a battle that has nothing to do with us? That's stealing my money in my book and I don't need "Russian trolls" to tell me that. For the record I, along with many others, didn't support the wars against Vietnam, "communism" or the Taliban. We should not be the world's police. A domestic, home grown opinion based on basic logic.
Polling disagrees with you here. Funding and helping Ukraine was massively popular in the US and transcended party lines until it became a wedge issue after the Republican primaries (what changed?).
Polling is easily manipulated and falsified. Just talk to any American and ask them if they're working hard so they can send their tax dollars to the Ukraine, you'll quickly find that there's no support.
US president Roosevelt actually started the creation of the United Nations to avoid another world war. If we want to avoid another world war, more policing is needed, and Roosevelt thought the US was in a good position to do this. No amount of financial efficiency weighs up to not having freedom. What is the worth of your millions if your family is gassed in concentration camps? That’s why I also don’t mind the European Union not being super efficient, as long as it brings us peace it’s worth it.
We are under no threat of that in the US. The UN is 100% ineffective anyway, they can't even stop or slow down Israel. Since the UN was created it's been the US that has been the major belligerent party across the globe. Our "policing" is the crime, we killed over a million Vietnamese people, over a million people in Iraq... we're the bad guys.
Agree, the us, and its allies have made some stupid decisions, but I would not be so sure there’s no threat from Russia. Putin may have already concurred the US by replacing its government by people that are owned by Putin, that vote and decide the way Putin wants them, and that are destroying the US and its economy so it can no longer be a leader in the world.
Israel did this long ago, not Russia. That's the threat. That's why our politicians vote the way Israel wants, that's also why they pass anti-free speech anti-BDS laws.
Any empire is the "bad guys" pretty much by definition, but there are still bad guys and worse guys. And Ukraine is very different from Afghanistan or Vietnam - it's a country that's genuinely asking for US military assistance against an external enemy that invaded it for openly imperialist reasons (annexing territory etc). Not just the Ukrainian government, but when you look at the polls, it really is a "people's war".
Now, that still doesn't obligate US to help. But it does mean that any military assistance that US does render to Ukraine can only improve its well-deserved "bad guy" image. If you truly believe that US did an evil thing by invading other countries, what better way to redeem yourself than to help someone who is being attacked by a bully just like you?
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?
I think it would be very reasonable to redefine the term monopoly (or "anti-competitiveness") so that it encompasses the closed technical platforms that dominate the 21st century.
Sure, but you can't do that legally without an act of congress, and the DOJ only (in theory) prosecutes when laws are broken. Redefining what a monopoly is doesn't really help in a courtroom.
Can you help me understand how I've broken the site guidelines? Both my comment and the parent's are good faith discussions cut along the same rhetoric this site has tolerated for years. None of the responses are even taking this into flamewar territory, it's a black-and-white pastiche of security versus obscurity.
> so we don't have to keep banning you
My account has five karma, Dan. One downside of uncommunicated permanent bans is that it precludes the leverage you ordinarily use to encourage reform.
> One downside of uncommunicated permanent bans is that it precludes the leverage you ordinarily use to encourage reform
I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying here. It seems simple to me though: if you'd stop breaking the site guidelines so repeatedly and badly then we'd be happy not to ban you again, and if you won't stop doing that, we have little choice.
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.
> It’s putting in place proper regulations to preserve privacy and security
That ship sailed so long ago. Not only because national security demanded warrantless backdoors, but because our companies now control regulation. If Tim Cook or Elon Musk take issue with some pesky demands for open architecture or security audits, they complain to Trump and resolve it via EO. Any protest is already quashed. Phone owners who don't actively resist hold no leverage against their OEM.
Stuff like F-Droid and PostmarketOS is the solution to this particular problem - people just don't want to admit it. It's easier to give up essential liberty, purchase temporary safety, and demand that you deserve security along with it too. Too few people realize that personal freedom is a necessary precondition to personal safety.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
In my younger days, I had a significant other who took advantage of my good nature, expected me to pay for everything, and was borderline abusive toward me at times. When I finally stood up to her, she told me she hated me. I believed her.
Could you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We had to ask you this just recently. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I promise not to exceed the level of unmoderated flamebait, vitriol, hatred and froth directed at me and my ideological cohort by the average HN poster.
That heuristic doesn't work! Everyone always overestimates the provocations done by others and underestimates their own. If the distortion is 10x each way and you go with this perception, that makes for a 100x skew [1]. This is how we end up with a downward spiral and the war of all against all [2]. It always feels like the other person started it and did worse [3]. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear [4].
What we need you to do instead is follow HN's rules regardless of how badly other people are breaking them or you feel they are. We need others to do that as well, of course—it's nothing personal.
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!
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.
847 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 483 ms ] threadthe EU has settled for using US tech but just taxing the success with fines
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.
It didn't help that these attempts were torpedoed aggressively by Microsoft, Google et al.
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...
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...
Hetzner is another big one that is for some reason not listed.
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.
https://github.com/dream-num/univer
https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite
https://github.com/firebase/firepad
https://github.com/prosemirror
https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online
https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc
https://github.com/gobby/gobby
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
For example, Hetzner doesn’t even offer database services. Some would consider those to be table stakes to run their application. Does it add complexity? Potentially. But we accept some additional complexity if it yields incremental value.
If you don’t value the additional functionality cloud providers offer, that’s fine. But lots of people do.
Certainly, unnecessary complexity should be avoided. But it’s a bit naive to associate comprehensiveness with complexity. They’re not entirely identical.
I am totally OK setting up my own database software on Hetzner. I understand that some people are used to "cloud" spoon-feeding them what they need and even what they really don't, but I perceive this as a nuisance.
I just checked a handful but didn't see any.
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.
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.
Fascism is a right-wing ideology was widespread throughout all of Europe before WWII, and especially took hold in Germany, Austria, and Italy. It was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from e.g. Stalinist Russia.
It is not a synonym for "bad government," "dictatorship," "violent government," or similar.
I did not give a definition for fascism. You can look ones up yourself. However, critically:
1. China is not right-wing. That's prerequisite.
2. China has very little fascist-style state / political violence, and virtually no paramilitary elements. You're at no risk of being beaten up or having your windows broken for having the wrong political views. Police officers didn't even have guns until recently. There aren't Brown Shirts and Black Shirts, are groups like the fascist right-wing militias in the US. Rather, the state violence you see there is institutionalized violence, through proper administrative and bureaucratic channels.
3. China has nationalism, but is very much not ultra-nationalist.
4. China does not try to eliminate minorities if they play ball. Indeed, China is very supportive of non-Han groups (who were, e.g. exempt from One Child). Rather, what you see is forceful "modernization" and cultural assimilation, leading up to violence if there isn't compliance. If the Muslim minorities in China decided to give up their religion, culture, and desire for freedom, and started to act like Han Chinese, they'd almost certainly be left alone. You saw the same directed at Han during the Great Leap Forward. For Jews in 1930 Germany, assimilating was very much not enough to be left alone.
5. Control of the economy is limited and directed. A lot of the Chinese economy is also like the Wild West.
.... and so on.
Note that I'm not passing a value judgment on which system of government is better or worse. However, "fascist" is not the same as "totalitarian."
One of the key things in China is that if you (personally and collectively) go along with the government, for the most part, you're very safe, and life is quite peaceful. Another is that most control is "soft." The wrong post online will simply be hard to find, load slowly, or not show up for other users. Or you'll have a harder time moving up in life.
It's very little like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s, where you had armed groups walking the streets, breaking windows.
Define right wing in this context. Its historically communist, but it not really so any more, as you your self admit "Control of the economy is limited and directed"
> China has nationalism, but is very much not ultra-nationalist.
It is very nationalist and believes its culture to be superior to minority culture which is why they are assimilating it.
> For Jews in 1930 Germany, assimilating was very much not enough to be left alone.
True, but I said "fascism" not "nazism" which are not the same thing.
> Rather, the state violence you see there is institutionalized violence, through proper administrative and bureaucratic channels.
is that a necessary trait? The Brownshirts were got rid of once the Nazis were in power. Once you control the state you no longer need the paramilitary.
> However, "fascist" is not the same as "totalitarian."
I agree, but I think China has a lot of traits in common with fascist states. it might not tick all the boxes in a definition, but it ticks far more than the typical dictatorship.
It's very hard for me to see how. Even taking everything you said about China at face value (some of which I might take issue with):
- Almost every dictator tries (with mixed success) to create a personality cult.
- Almost every totalitarian state tries to build nationalist fervor to keep people in-line
- Almost every totalitarian state uses state violence to maintain control
- Almost every culture believes itself to be superior, and most successful politician try to exploit that (with the exception of a few on the far left)
... and so on.
I think a necessary and requisite element for fascism is an army of thugs and a pervasive level of fear. That's different from, for example, an army of educated bureaucrats deciding to stick problem individuals in a gulag. The brownshirts were never gotten rid of, but rather were institutionalized into the SA and to some extent, the SS. They were still thugs and relatively indiscriminate violence.
China lacks thugs. If you don't stick your head up, I don't see many people fear the government. People generally keep their heads down, fall in line, and lead normal lives.
I don't know if it's core to fascism, but expansionism and imperialism is also rather lacking in China. There are some disputes, mind, you, about places which China thinks should belong, namely Tibet, Taiwan, Mongolia, a little bit of Russia (formerly Manchuria), a few mountains near India, and a few islands, but critically, those ambitions have not changed in nearly a century.
https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/sep...
A useful resource: https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-tr...
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.
There are plenty of other alternatives, e.g. Softmaker Office and Papyrus are German word processor and office applications.
You will surprised, but American businesses benefit from selling their services.
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.
Maybe Linux will end up making big inroads in Europe, replacing Windows and MicroSoft Office and Office 365 along with Google Docs.
On the one hand, this is a bland, press-release congratulations letter that could apply to any new president.
On the other hand, it signals "business as usual".
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/01/20/tim-cook-joins-bi...
> Why not Oracle or even IBM.
a) They're not as prominent as the 4 mentioned
b) as an acronym, "MAGAFIO" doesn't have the same punch to it. It's cluttered. We get the idea that the 2nd tier tech oligarchs are on board anyway.
But what’s the alternative?
Some open source projects are rebranded as Russian with minimal changes, that happens, yes, but that's the result of gaming the system that incentivizes development of Russian software, not the result of sanctions.
Russian replacements of Office 365 and Google Docs seem to be doing well.
As for hardware, the EU is not yet under American sanctions.
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.
What Microsoft might end up doing is following the China model, essentially giving control over their EU servers (probably only those in a special region) to an EU company, while still supplying the software and taking a (very large) cut of the profits.
This is Google + Thales doing the 3rd party operator model, with the operator being a subsidiary of Thales and not Google.
(NB: I work for Google in the EU.)
1. US companies hosting EU data on EU servers are more vulnerable to US Govt demand, not less.
2. US-EU Privacy Shield does not exist anymore.
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."
https://nextcloud.com/blog/eu-court-withdraw-personal-data-o...
Any cloud provider that operates in the US and claims to offer data sovereignty is lying.
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.
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.
I'd certainly enjoy the case studies of European enterprises jumping from full-scale Azure and AWS deployments to OVHcloud or Hetzner, though. That'd make for some interesting reading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5_4DvPO-7w
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/20/airbus-could-prioritise-non-...
If my (Canadian) government decides to ban Azure in a year, my critical infrastructure company ignores it for 11 months because they figure it won't actually happen, and then goes to the government to tell them that if the ban actually goes through, our infrastructure stops working because we'd actually need a multi-year timeframe to migrate off of Azure.
Blaming Trump for their own well-known problems is silly. They were dependent on the US before him and they will continue to be dependent on the US after him until they look in the mirror and decide to fix what is broken.
But the argument of the parent might be that a very active open source community based in Europe points towards a big potential of experienced developers working at their mid sized companies in the shadow of American big tech. Once big tech is gone...
Don't know what it is. Am I not fake enough? Not forcing fake smiles and excluding obnoxious positivity constantly? Not ego stroking the interviewer? Am I doomed to, in comparison to US, poverty wages?
Absolutely infuriating.
My last company paid 2-2.5x a UK salary for a US engineer. Perhaps the ratio for a company like Meta is closer, but I doubt it's equal. For startups you may find random roles that have equal pay globally, but they're relatively uncommon.
In practice, this means no US cloud providers provide foreign data sovereignty (though many claim to).
As long as whatever sham of a data protection agency was nominally functional in the US european elites could convince themselves that it was legal to transfer personal data to some US corporations, but now that agency is defunct.
But yeah, it's a bad idea to do business with empires. Sooner or later they turn to bullying and extortion.
Russian gas? Suddenly build nuclear?
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.
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.
Hetzner has existed for a really long time, I'm not even sure what "cloud" means in your context.
Object storage and VMs is what made AWS "cloud" 15 years ago, so by that definition Hetzner only just became a cloud provider.
But the more important point was that they started branding themselves as a cloud vendor 4 years ago, and investing in new offerings around that pitch, but it’s taking them far too long to release basic parts of the offering, and they’re falling behind.
the real point is not ipv6 (or this or that specific service). the point is the attitude.
anybody in this subthread bikeshedding what aws service supports what version of the ip protocol has missed the point and would probably fail a text comprehension test.
Depending on the context, and granted, lacking some of the subtle details missing in the interaction described, might actually show real experience in the field.
"Why No IPv6?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40039154
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.
Linus moved to the US and since 2010 is an american citizen, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Personal_life
Thank you for backing up my argument, I guess?
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.
And they are going to stay there once the megalomaniac in chief and his South African oligarch have gone with their wrecking ball through the very fabric of the US society and economy?
This was possible because motivated individuals held technical positions in the ISP while the management has been totally incompetent and was later jugged outright corrupt.
Because of corrupt management and public scandals, my ISP has been sold to Orange. I am afraid this will end the 25 years of technical excellence as well.
All of these nice F35s made in USA, will soon have no buyers except the USA itself.
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.
It is this generation's F-16, many thousands will be built and sold.
Will it tear up existing deals and say 'accept the new terms or your planes won't fly'?
Why today would one spend $100M on 1 equipment unit when you can pump instead $100M and get 10M unstoppable drones?
What drones are you going to get for $10 each (now or in the future)? How are they “unstoppable”? How are you going to deploy millions of $10 drones on the battlefield without tons of $100M platforms that can survive AA defenses long enough to get to the engagement? How much range do you think $10 of batteries even gets you?
That is without me manufacturing any of the components. If one had a nation state backing I am confident it can be done for a fraction of it.
They are unstoppable because if you have a tank and there is a swarm of 500 of them what do you aim? One of them will find the opening to drop the grenade on your tanks weak spot. These are all single use kamikaze drones.
Same for battery range. Europe is preparing for a defensive war on their land. Even 10 miles of ranges should suffice. You can always deploy them from a mothership.
And you’re entirely ignoring the very real problem of the mothership which has to survive to get within ten miles of the battlefield, unless you’re planning on releasing them from box trucks which means their range will either be useless or they’ll get taken out by bigger, more expensive loitering drones the second they’re spotted. War is antagonistic co-evolution in its purest form, these naive solutions dont last very long which is why our weapons cost so much (for everyone, not just the west).
I totally agree with you that drone swarms is not a silver bullet, and likely some effective adversarial strategy will be developed(jamming, attacking motherships etc), but the point is that airplanes are not as important as they were in the past. Ukraine is still standing with no real air presence.
The main point of conflict is that the US holds the source code for the advanced software systems very closely, no partner country has access. A lot of the differentiated and exotic capabilities of the F-35 that make it attractive to other countries are in the software, everyone recognizes this. There are many algorithms and techniques that rely on classified computer science to deliver qualitative advantages. Even if other countries could replicate the hardware, without replicating the software anything they built would be a pale shadow of the F-35 in terms of capability, which makes alternative hardware much less compelling.
The US knows all the leverage is in the software, so that is the part they strictly control. It is yet another case of the software eating the world, military systems edition.
I suspect that by the time anyone was able to successfully reverse engineer it, it would be semi-obsolete, which limits the value in doing so. Playing catch-up requires taking a lot of aggressive R&D risks that European governments have traditionally been very uncomfortable with or which take far too long to execute.
Maybe the source code also contains a secret kill switch? I'd definitely put one in if I was selling fighter planes to 3rd parties. Alliances can switch overnight, as we're seeing right now.
IIRC the French refused to give the UK the means to disable Argentina's Exocets during the Falklands War.
I think European alternatives for F35 are obviously needed.
(as of this comment, Bluesky has ~32M users and counting)
We just need to see if phpbb can scale to a billion, and if not, why not.
The UK's largest "social" sites are pretty much forums (e.g. Mumsnet, The Student Room, DigitalSpy, MoneySavingExpert) and while they're good for their respective topics, they don't cover the Reddit/Facebook/Instagram use cases (they could be arguably considered on a par with individual sub-reddits).
If you make each individual bulletin board receive broadcasts from a central server, then you get the network effects of Facebook and Reddit. Individual boards can just sub to the central server keeping them connected to the hivemind or not. Your community can remain isolated or throttled (only 30% of global updates get through). We do this manually here, where not all global posts get through (you'd be hard pressed to push a Reddit post to the top here). It's the simplest way to federate using existing technology.
This model is already at play. X, Bluesky, Reddit, Truth Social, and Rumble are basically heavily funded private message boards with a large mindshare subscriber base.
Taking our message boards back is proving to be difficult, especially because trying to move the userbase off of it is the same as trying to move people off drugs.
Your're doing this with phpBB? Doesn't happen to be open-source somewhere?
Would be interesting to have a look, I think I a bit like this opt-in partial federation / hivemind. Would be even more interesting if it was possible to sync comments between such forums.
**
Developing forum software myself, Talkyard. Based in Europe (Sweden).
Started thinking even more about using some European cloud, as an option. There's a Swedish hosting provider that looks interesting (I think)
I guess you could do syncing kind of like how CCing email is done. CC my home server and global server. This gives you agency to remain detached from the hivemind, and vice versa. This is not some idea out of left field, it's roughly my workflow between Reddit or HN or other sites. I manually do the filtering in my mind when I move through different channels.
Phpbb is open source, but I mostly brought it up to show that Facebook is just that, and nothing more. Forking Reddit will also give you a Facebook clone (and a Reddit clone).
Websearched for "phpBB federation" and "phpbb subscribe rss broadcasts", found this:
"Feed post bot: This extension enables you to read any RSS, ATOM or RDF feed. It looks for new items every half hour and post them to a specified forum." https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=456&t=241159...
Intering way to use RSS
No need for that, we are just half a billion in Europe.
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.
See also: https://mergr.com/transaction/ebay-acquires-marktplaats-bv
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.
I do see opportunities with LLMs as making all kind of platforms language agnostic - you should be able to write your own language and read your own language even if other person is from different country using different language.
https://joinmastodon.org/about
(So is SAP, for that matter.)
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.
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.
(I’m not disputing the chances, just the logic of the analogy with Airbus.)
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.
Could you possibly name any specific riscs?
I think MAGA is good for Europe, there’s a big incentive to remove any kind of US dependency.
I think the harder services to replace are things like Github and O365/Google Workplace.
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.
Are there good resources for comparing clouds with sovereignty in mind?
It's a marathon, not a sprint. I live with a high living standard with access to good health care. Hey, I also live in a democracy, and you're right that I think we need to defend that well. Let's hope & see if we have what it takes..
And most of the world doesn't run on fancy new gizmos (that don't make money for the shareholders anyway). Europe is still rich because it produces high value items like steel from iron ore, and machines and cars from steel.
MRNA - Pfizer, Moderna, and DARPA (who was involved in funding research) are all American. Just not BioNTech
Stable diffusion - the original diffusion paper was at Stanford in the US, not Europe
EUV - a DARPA project whose tech was licensed to ASML
That said, American tech depends on getting great talent from all over.
See, parent is right? Safe/not safe dichotomy helps nobody
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
To be clear, this was 10 years ago so things may have changed. Also, my task was memory bandwidth limited, where even changing the memory access patterns slowed things down by 10% or more.
Alright so get a magical amulet.
If China and Russia can somehow solve the issue and manage their infra, I don't see why EU, for example, can't.
It's better to have at least partially protected your whole government and citizens data than having it handed directly to the foreign intelligence in bulk. That's the question about political will, we don't talk about average Joe here.
Except if any of the bits are flipped you're f-d; especially so if your adversary is a nation.
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.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance has been missing. Too many decades of nepotism, insider trading, corruption ( starting with lobbying ), have led to the lack of transparency. The movie “The Big Short” has explained some of these issues.
It seems the Pentagon audit process only started in 2018, and Congress gave a deadline of 2028 to pass a fully clean audit, which they have made progress on:
> Of the 28 military agencies, DoD leaders think 11 are expected to receive clean audit opinions, one more than the previous fiscal year.
[1] https://thenationaldesk.com/news/fact-check-team/pentagon-fa...
At the moment, the US government seems to be mainly focused on causing headlines to make their base happy who want quick victories and have not shown resilience to simplistic takes, and - of course - to make the opposition party and their supporters panic.
[0](https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/management/office-f...)
Is that example supposed to be an indication that the US Govt. does take its national security and secrets seriously?
It is so clear in retrospect how fake the outrage was.
He may not have won the popular vote by much, but he certainly has a dedicated base of staunch supporters.
By their unceasing jeering, bright hats, and constant online presence I'd be surprised if there's anyone hasn't noticed them by this point.
Somehow it's worse than in 2016
* More creative threat-modeling.
* More effective prevention measures.
* More vigorous mitigation & stonewalling attempts.
* More rapid remediation & rejection of the intrusion.
Especially for a threat vector that was telegraphed so openly so far in advance. The circumstances might be unprecedented, but they're not at all surprising.
There are plenty of mitigation and stonewalling going on, but mostly through the courts.
Executives must have some power, or else the process itself becomes the executive and there's no ability to respond to anything.
If there's anybody to blame, we must place the blame on the executive wielding the power, and those who have enabled this to happen by putting that particular executive in power by subverting the traditional vetting process. If a political party no longer performs basic vetting of that level then the entire party should probably be eliminated.
He said it was what he was going to do, he was up on the stage, I heard many many people salivating for DOGE cuts like this before the election, and even today.
I agree, and frankly anyone feeling "surprised" right now probably still thinks strongly worded emails and letters are enough to solve the problems they're just now seeing. Those things rely on a stable democracy where constituents and what happens to them matter at all.
No, it’s completely different than that. Some of them I’ve talked to, they’re confused about this Musk Internet guy. And they’re confused why their news isn’t giving them the predictive edge those aware of Project 2025 seem to have in conversation. “I guess we’ll see…” “I guess we’ll have to have hope…” The same people willing to accept fabulist conspiracy theories for non-white-male candidates now openly rely on faith-based appeals about the character of the richest man in the world.
People like him don't spend without an expectation of something in return.
The more surprising thing is the amount of people who think successful capitalist = successful political leader, when the incentives and constituencies are drastically different.
> In the CNN poll, Musk having a prominent role in the administration is viewed as a “bad thing” (54-28) by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio. The Post-Ipsos poll showed Americans disapprove by a similarly wide margin (52-26) of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary.”
> And Americans said 63 to 34 that they are concerned about Musk’s team getting access to their data, which is the subject of high-profile legal fights.
> Even 37 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they are at least “somewhat” concerned about Musk getting their data.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/20/trump-pol...
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
EDIT: Case in point.
That should scare everyone given his propaganda machinery aimed at elections he does or doesn’t like
"other voices" is a joke given how much censorship there is on twitter
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.
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
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.
Very few actually qualified and capable techies here trust any of the US-based cloud providers.
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.
There are cloud environments specifically for classified info:
https://aws.amazon.com/federal/secret-cloud/
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/coreinfrastructurea...
https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/?whats-new.sort-by=item.a...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-government/doc...
The government doesn't have leverage. The government is Amazon and Microsoft's leverage against others.
If your data is well encrypted they practically don't have any access to any of the information except how much of it there is
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.
does this not refer to moving data?
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.
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.
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.
If a country's citizens want to give away their data, it's well within their right to do so. At most, the U.S. Government should educate about it, much like tobacco dangers.
Having that said, U.S. citizens with clearance and/or government employees should be subject to data loss prevention measures, like they already do[0].
I'd be forward for a ban if it was an issue of public mental health, but the U.S. Government cannot take that angle because they'd have to kill Meta Platforms as well. They know they can't, Meta lobbyists will not allow that.
But restricting TikTok based on data control and free speech liberties, that's overreaching. I've already seen TikTok videos of people saying they'd stamp their U.S. passport on the forehead and give it to Chinese ByteDance rather than use Instagram. It is well within their rights to do so if they so desire.
--
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-tiktok-is-being-ba...
Ban TikTok? Do whatever, I don't use my account. I deleted the app long ago.
Why do you do it? Fight that tooth and nail. Do it for the right reason and be consistent.
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.
https://reason.com/2024/12/26/foia-for-all/
[1]https://rclone.org/crypt/
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.
Why would encrypted data, which the provider holds no keys to, be a dangerous way For a government to hold a secret?
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.
Maybe an influx of business will make us grow the European clouds, but that's ok, we're up to it.
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.
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
Every war that the NATO countries somehow miraculously got involved in is an economic war for natural resources and control, and the big EU countries always take their share of the pie.
Ukraine’s resources, one way or another, will be split up between Russia, EU, and the US (or more precisely it will end up in the hands of the oligarchs and “black rocks” of these countries).
What other incentives than control, resources or economics do wars in general have? Why do you hold the countries you mentioned to higher standards?
Sorry I mean American's wars, not the EU's wars. The EU hasn't really done resource wars since the colonial times.
france is involved in resource conflicts all over subsaharan africa bffr
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.
At some point Ukraine will run out of men. As much as I want to, I don't see US troops deployed to Ukraine, maybe EU can send its troops? Biden said as much at the start of the war, too, and it's still true.
At this point I don't see a Ukrainian victory over Russia and going back to 1992 borders. They will have to give a lot of things up and the longer it waits, the worse its negotiate position will be.
At the start of the war EVERYONE said Russia would take Ukraine in days, and asked Zelenskyy when he wanted to evacuate. Not sure why anything they said back then is worth while to base opinions on today.
There is still a lot of that hope but it's also a different time. The bravery of of Ukrainians in the initial wave and the counter-offensive as unmatched. The West helped but it didn't help enough. It was always piece-mailing military equipment. With a lot of wait times and a lot of hand wringing. We gave them tanks, but no F16s at the time. We could given them AA weapons earlier and more of it. They also made mistakes, there is a decent amount of corruption, and fumbled on recruiting after those who wanted to fight joined they started sending vans with military dressed people to effectively kidnap men off the streets or their places of employment. That looks bad and make their own people fearful of the military and those men won't be fighting the same way as those who sign up voluntarily.
> OK. But Ukraine choses to keep figting. Let them decide their fate
Their fate was never really just their own after the initial resistance. Without the Western help they couldn't have lasted this long. The West both helped a lot, and not enough at the same time. It's like a friend needing life saving surgery and it costs $10k. We send him $8k. He should be very grateful for such a generous gift, but everyone knows that also won't be enough and he will likely die.
> 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...
The general idea, sure. They offered that in return for security guarantees or as collateral for continued military aid.
That is not what is being offered them by this administration. Instead the administration has chosen the mafia shakedown route. American military aid to Ukraine to date amounts to around $100 billion dollars (and we're not talking stacks of cash here but rather the "value" of military hardware, much of which already had an expiration date and was literally designed and built for the Russia-invades-Europe scenario). But Trump is demanding $500 million from Ukraine, and offering zero in return. As of today many concessions have been demanded from Ukraine, but zero concessions have been asked of Russia - much the opposite actually.
> and we're not talking stacks of cash here but rather the "value" of military hardware, much of which already had an expiration date and was literally designed and built for the Russia-invades-Europe scenario
That's not true at all, US has sent billions of financial aid[0]. Compare that to Europe's aid which was majority in the form of loans, which Europe gets to collect interest on based off of frozen Russian assets.
0. https://www.ukraineoversight.gov/Funding/
It is zero in return and that's why Ukraine have not agreed to either of the two versions of the deal.
The vast majority of the aid is not financial aid, it's physical hardware.
$500 Billion, right?
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.
Here's a count of European contributions to the war. Is this embarrassing?
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/united-states-america...
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.
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.
Plus, current goverment don't care about laws and people on top of it have history of retaliating against speech.
I like free speech, but I would rather not die because an army of Russian trolls managed to replace Western democratic governments with Russian puppets.
Anyway, I tend to agree that "too much" freedom of speech is not the real issue here. Across Western world, neoliberal economic policy has failed to bring prosperity among large segments of population. Politicians have also ignored very real issues, such as failed humanitarian migration policies, DEI-policies which discriminate against particular "privileged" groups and so on. Trolls would have much lower success rate, and far right parties would be much smaller if these concerns had been taken seriously before by mainstream parties. People who are happy and optimistic about their lives and future rarely become extremists.
Also, a vote for the right is a vote to increase the gap between the poor and the wealthy, things will only get worse.
I don't vote "right" because the Democrats and the Republicans are both working against my interests.
And that distrust starts with this dishonest framing like ‘ukrain are stealing our dollars’. No they’re not, it’s your politicians that decided it was in the interest of the US to have wars: fight hitler (thank you!), fight communism in Vietnam, fund and later fight saddam, fund and later fight taliban.
But now you have a government that no longer thinks fighting Putin is useful, because they think the Russian style of government is the way to go, and not a threat to the US way of life. I doubt they’re right, the average Russian in the country leads a very poor life, and freedom is not a priority in Russia, if you disagree with government you will get thrown out of a window.
But your government is now following the government style of Russia, not following the rules of law, not following democratic, constitutional rules. Do you really want to be next Russia?
Polling disagrees with you here. Funding and helping Ukraine was massively popular in the US and transcended party lines until it became a wedge issue after the Republican primaries (what changed?).
Now, that still doesn't obligate US to help. But it does mean that any military assistance that US does render to Ukraine can only improve its well-deserved "bad guy" image. If you truly believe that US did an evil thing by invading other countries, what better way to redeem yourself than to help someone who is being attacked by a bully just like you?
They always seem to have imagined themselves to sit halfway across the Atlantic instead of a few miles off the French coast.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> so we don't have to keep banning you
My account has five karma, Dan. One downside of uncommunicated permanent bans is that it precludes the leverage you ordinarily use to encourage reform.
"Don't be snarky."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> One downside of uncommunicated permanent bans is that it precludes the leverage you ordinarily use to encourage reform
I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying here. It seems simple to me though: if you'd stop breaking the site guidelines so repeatedly and badly then we'd be happy not to ban you again, and if you won't stop doing that, we have little choice.
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.
That ship sailed so long ago. Not only because national security demanded warrantless backdoors, but because our companies now control regulation. If Tim Cook or Elon Musk take issue with some pesky demands for open architecture or security audits, they complain to Trump and resolve it via EO. Any protest is already quashed. Phone owners who don't actively resist hold no leverage against their OEM.
Stuff like F-Droid and PostmarketOS is the solution to this particular problem - people just don't want to admit it. It's easier to give up essential liberty, purchase temporary safety, and demand that you deserve security along with it too. Too few people realize that personal freedom is a necessary precondition to personal safety.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Related:
'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
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.
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.
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.
Given you think America behavior is reasonable now, I have doubts about you ever having nature you claim.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What we need you to do instead is follow HN's rules regardless of how badly other people are breaking them or you feel they are. We need others to do that as well, of course—it's nothing personal.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(As you can see, I've been at the task of explaining this for a while now...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43151226 is also not cool
The US threat model has changed given the current regime. So it's appropriate to update your security practices
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!
The only good providers I'd use again are London based.
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.