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U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

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Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#131
post #114
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company choosing to operate in multiple jurisdictions with competing/contradicting laws does not put a requirement on lawmakers to make the laws more amenable to the company trying to satisfy both jurisdictions. If you take that path, consumers end up with little protection under the law. Maybe the company should split up operations, or operate under licensing agreements with foreign companies rather than thwart th…

You're right, it's not the government's job to protect business models, particularly if they are considered harmful. A sensible government would probably want a healthy environment and market for companies to operate it, but exactly what that means is clearly something on which governments can radically disagree. So I admit that the US is entirely within its rights to create a law that makes it impossible for cloud p…

You're right, it's not the government's job to protect business models, particularly if they are considered harmful.

That's a convenient way to pass the buck, but the reality is that this is why we can't (any longer, lawfully) have nice things.

It's particularly hypocritical in this case that the EU itself is a facilitator of its member states' security services getting access to personal data in ways that would otherwise clearly violate its own privacy laws, yet it objects strenuously when other countries do exactly the same thing. There is no principled ethical argument at stake here. It's all about who has the power and everyone trying to grab more of it than they're really entitled to, instead of acting like grown-ups, recognising the limits of their own authority, and collaborating with others in areas of genuine mutual interest when there is wider international agreement on certain principles.

Perhaps we need another exercise in shutting everything down, to show how much the general public and the businesses in each place stand to lose if this chest-thumping carries on. Just choose a random week and then firewall off every US-based social network in Europe, fine any US-based financial services businesses that do any sort of data processing of EU individuals, and so on. And then a few years later, once the inept politicians have been replaced and when the catastrophic economic damage caused in just that one week has started to heal, maybe we can get back to a more sensible approach to the whole issue of international relations in the age of global communications.

Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#132
post #5

Is there a good European cloud provider?

If you want bang for your buck, Contabo (Germany) might be for you. If you want reliable service, Leaseweb is based in the EU (Netherlands). There's also OVH (French) which provides decent service with their cheaper subsidiary Kimsufi (super cheap, older model dedicated servers).

As for companies which I don't know much about quality wise, there's Strato (German I believe), CloudVPS (Netherlands), Hetzner (Germany) and Upcloud (Finland).

I only know about North Western European hosting providers, but I assume there's loads more across the continent.

Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only solution seems to be to ensure that they are two different companies. If the EU comany is a subsiduary of the US company, then it will have to follow its orders and won't really be separate. Furthermore if people based in the USA have physical access to the servers located in the EU, then if the US government wants that data, it will probably be exfiltrated to the USA, regardless of what EU governments wan…

Here lies humanity, they tried to do the same things 15 different ways and squandered their resources doing so. (Not saying you’re advocating for this, just that it is the current plan it seems)

That does seem to be a common occurrence when there is a sufficiently large number of people. I work for a large Fortune 150 company. At least once a year a new department is created that duplicates what my department has been doing for 15 years. Inevitably someone who knows of us tells the other group and they get in touch with us to find out what we actually do. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in where the other group finds out that we already do 100% of what they've been tasked to do. They always look at each other with expressions of confused disbelief, wondering what they are supposed to do now. Sometimes they find some niche (on occasion we've thrown them some scraps of things we used to do that we no longer have any interest in pursuing), usually they are quickly dissolved. The worst was a group that had existed for more than a year and had already spent millions of dollars, only to be dissolved as soon as higher ups found out they existed and were trying (unwittingly) to duplicate our mature solution.

Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#134
post #26

I think this CLOUD Act will basically force internationally operating US companies to split up into a US part and an EU part. This law makes it impossible for any company with access to personal data of EU citizens, to obey both US and EU law. The only solution seems to be to ensure that they are two different companies. The other option is to abandon the EU market. What still surprises me is that nearly all of the m…

> The only solution seems to be to ensure that they are two different companies. If the EU comany is a subsiduary of the US company, then it will have to follow its orders and won't really be separate. Furthermore if people based in the USA have physical access to the servers located in the EU, then if the US government wants that data, it will probably be exfiltrated to the USA, regardless of what EU governments wan…

Good luck trying to explain this to EU politicians. They'll just cry and demand to know European competitors to those services.

Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here lies humanity, they tried to do the same things 15 different ways and squandered their resources doing so. (Not saying you’re advocating for this, just that it is the current plan it seems)

> Here lies humanity, they tried to do the same things 15 different ways and squandered their resources doing so. Polities that don't retain control over their computing infrastructure will in the future have effectively ceded independence to others. Because controlling the full stack from silicon to cloud services is expensive (fabs can cost c. $20 billion), this has geo-political implications: namely that in the fu…

The EU won't be content with it, but they still won't do anything about it.

Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#137
post #26

I think this CLOUD Act will basically force internationally operating US companies to split up into a US part and an EU part. This law makes it impossible for any company with access to personal data of EU citizens, to obey both US and EU law. The only solution seems to be to ensure that they are two different companies. The other option is to abandon the EU market. What still surprises me is that nearly all of the m…

The situation you describe (companies "splitting") already exists, and it's also already not a good guarantee of actual privacy. I'm not convinced that this is any kind of solution.

Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#138
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> believes conspiracy theories about spy microchips in mainboards. You mean not everyone believes the cold, hard truth? That's unfortunate, because most of us here saw the evidence of this taking place.

Interesting. Can you provide a source?

The Snowden leaks.

We saw photographs of this taking place in what looked like an assembly line or distribution centre, along with accompanying text from internal NSA presentation slides.

Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#139
post #70
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Claims...

How is that a chip in a mainboard ? The mainboard story was a propaganda piece in Bloomberg aimed at China.

Afaik the processor is a chip on the mainboard. I personally don't care which part of the mainboard carries the backdoor.

Re: U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality

#140
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Claims...

With respect, what you linked to is a conspiracy theory that the ME is used in ways other than explicitly stated by Intel and unsupported by any evidence other than allegation.

A part of my machine which I have no control over and which I cannot remove is a backdoor. Some would call that even malware. I don't care whether it has been solely used for the intended purpose which I can't even verify.
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