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Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
111–120 of 291 posts
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#112No I don't think Obama did anything.
I swear, it's like nobody ever read the USA PATRIOT act, even though its been law for 12 years. Obama's fault? For what, following the laws that Congress passed?
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#113No. Because most people don't care about privacy that much. See TSA scanners, foursquare, hell GMail scans your data everytime you read mails, Facebook doesn't even pretend there is a privacy. Damn, first thing any Apple computer do is taking your picture, getting your details and sending it all to Cupertino, before you even load the OS. Android tries to track all your phones under one account you have to add before…
My personal experience with reselling Google Apps here in Australia is quite different, privacy of data is almost always the first or second question they ask. I also rejoiced at AWS coming to Sydney, but having servers physically located in Australia does nothing to protect data by law from the US Govt.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#114I think 'destroyed' is a strong word, and it's still early. Damaged? That's probably fair. I wonder if that's a major reason the Google-centric 'The Internship' movie kinda bombed this weekend. I mean, it might just be a crappy movie (didn't see the reviews), but I do suspect a lot of people weren't really into seeing a movie about Google after all this.
The average movie-goer wouldn't make the association unless the story were in the headlines for weeks, maybe months, on end. It just doesn't look like a great movie.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't expect non-Americans to be all that familiar with my country, and vice versa. But think about it. The NSA has been around since 1952. They now have N billions of dollars of black budget. The relevant Congressional oversight committees are prohibited from talking about what they learn. They are (supposedly) constitutionally prohibited from spying on Americans. If they aren't (or say the aren't) spying on Ameri…
Well obviously many governments have spies. There's even a genre of entertainment constructed around spies. And generally in the spy narrative the spy is after guys from the other country, not his own. The revelation here is that if you are a non-American your data that you store via a company based in the US is available to the US government with virtually (maybe even literally?) no protections. And this isn't tin f…
> And this isn't tin foil paranoia, the US Government just told you that in public discourse.
You know, if you had said that about anything else, it'd be a transparency win.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article you linked to: "With the latest revelations just days – in some cases, hours – old, it’s too soon to know for sure." I think it's still too early and I'd wait until all the facts are out. I can't speak for how people in other countries are feeling, but I can say this... As an American startup founder, I'd be very worried about what my international customers would think if they knew I was working sec…
True. We know so far that they've limited the original PRISM scope to major infrastructure providers and social media. This is obvious since that would cast the widest net. As a startup founder, if your operation does get popular enough to catch the eye of the NSA, realistically there's absolutely nothing you can do to fight it . That's how far ingrained the instruments of our own deconstruction are. And they're buri…
I wonder if Dropbox are caught up in this too?
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#117I am an American and I just want to point out that my latest startup ( http://www.efficito.com ) is a Limited UK company, and my co-founder is from the Netherlands. It would certainly be to my advantage if things change. We offer cloud-based ERP, and you might be interested to know our main hosting server is currently in the Czech Republic. We are also paranoid about security (all access is encrtpted, and we are look…
I'm a UK citizen with a startup http://microco.sm that has gone to some lengths to avoid US domains, companies and laws.
All of our domains are EU based, the company is UK based, and whilst we've used Linode for blog and basic site-hosting and will use Cloudflare for CDN, we are putting nothing on the server of a US company that could be a risk to privacy.
All of our data we are keeping within the EU which we feel holds much better standards and has stricter laws on data protection, and for user-generated content we feel that the EU E-commerce Act is better than the DMCA and risk created by the copyright lobby in the US.
Ultimately what this means is that for our core data and API, European companies with no US parent or holding company will win our hosting business.
We will still use US companies, but in a way that is little more than transport and performance increases for US-based users. But even then, we are not requiring real identity and we are implementing SSL everywhere and are happy if users use VPNs or Tor to connect.
Why all the fuss? I believe that through a persons' interests one can determine political affiliation. So I believe that to allow people to organise themselves freely around their hobbies and pastimes, that we must consider this and protect them from any entities that might use that information against the individuals. Further I believe that when people of shared interest come together that they are likely to organise to protect and preserve that interest, and this means that interest groups galvanise ad-hoc lobby groups and activists.
I also hope it changes, but I'm going to act as if I believe it will get worse on all fronts.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#118One of the rather interesting side issues in this whole debate has been how casually the rights of foreigners are tossed aside as secondary to those of american citizens. There is intense debate about whether US citizens rights are being violated, but almost nobody questions whether there's any moral or ethical issue with completely unrestrained spying on everybody else. While I understand that this is largely becaus…
Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#119This is a huge deal. I live in Australia and I have been running businesses on the cloud for the last 3 years or so. I have rarely heard the issue of the PATRIOT Act raised and in spite of there being laws banning the transfer of personal data outside Australia, most people are quite lax about the issue and take the view that the risks are too small to be counted. Those days are most certainly over. This stuff will a…
There are technological solutions to address this for US firms. Encryption on the client side, before data is sent to the cloud, would work. I would suspect (hope) that browser makers will quickly introduce features that make sending and receiving end-to-end encrypted communications (email etc.) a thoughtless process - since that is the only way to get people to use it.
Even better, perhaps someone will write software that sits on top of the network stack and automatically negotiates secure communications regardless of the origin client software. Maybe some sort of public key registry might come into play.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#120It's odd, I hear people saying, "no big deal, nothing will change." But then I wonder, if you're saying it's no big deal, are you an American or not? The point of this pst is that foreign business will be affected, AFAICT, Europeans have always held the Internet to a stricter standard than Americans and have passed stricter laws around everything from what data can be retained to the behaviour of tracking cookies. If…
Europeans tend to have higher standards for protecting the privacy of the personal data of their citizens from access and use by private corporations. But what the U.S. NSA is doing is sifting data for connections to foreigners who are suspected of being terrorists. I would be shocked if Euro intelligence agencies are not doing the same thing.
At least Sweden is publicly and legally doing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law