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Dear USA, my data has left your building

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Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#31

Post by jacquesm »

scrrr wrote: post #26

I suspected there was going to be a mass exodus. NSA basically killed cloud-computing. I don't think it will come back soon. And while on the subject, consider selling your Microsoft stock. How many enterprise customers will choose Microsoft products again after 2013?

> NSA basically killed cloud-computing.

I don't think the current disgust will last too long. A lot of people will move, at some point they'll realize the grass isn't all that much greener on the other side.

There is a definite activation energy required for such a move and I'm sure that the NSA debacle provided just that for a fairly large number of parties but in the very long term the difference will be small. (In the short term it will be quite significant, at least as long as this issue is on the front-burner in the media).

The response to things like this is usually an impulse with a strong attenuation over time. It'll never quite become 0 but it will get close to 0 in a fairly short time.

The reason why right now we are seeing all this movement is because Glenn Greenwald specifically is doing an extremely good job of keeping the focus on this subject. Mainstream media would normally have completely passed an issue like this by as too technical and not enough human interest to spend a lot of time on (both of those are negatives in a news cycle that thrives on eyeballs and associated advertising).

The longer this story is kept in the public eye the bigger the fall-out will be. For now, I'm very impressed with how they are managing this, considering the adversary.

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#32

Post by shiven »

timw6n wrote: post #28
dshep wrote: post #22

Can anyone recommend a linux VPS host outside the US as an alternative to Linode or Digitalocean?

http://www.bigv.io/ is UK based and seems rather popular.

Why is a US lapdog country like the UK, any better in the context of this post?

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#33

Post by scrrr »

jacquesm wrote: post #31
scrrr wrote: post #26

I suspected there was going to be a mass exodus. NSA basically killed cloud-computing. I don't think it will come back soon. And while on the subject, consider selling your Microsoft stock. How many enterprise customers will choose Microsoft products again after 2013?

> NSA basically killed cloud-computing. I don't think the current disgust will last too long. A lot of people will move, at some point they'll realize the grass isn't all that much greener on the other side. There is a definite activation energy required for such a move and I'm sure that the NSA debacle provided just that for a fairly large number of parties but in the very long term the difference will be small. (In…

Greenwald somewhere mentioned that there's material for months to come if I am not mistaken. So besides that he's doing a good job (agreed), I think Snowden simply provided a huge amount of information.

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#36

Post by mbesto »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #10
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Nitpickers aside (yes, what they had they may still have or at least in digest form) this is a single instance of a tidal wave of people doing this. EU datacenters are doing quite well because of the NSA revelations. The economic impact of this could very well counteract any net plus the US had while they were able to spy at will. Likely it's not going to be the same parties that will end up footing the bill. The pra…

More to the point, this is a problem of layers. It's not just where you decide to host. Most every national government is probably involved in data sniffing to one degree or another, major hubs are/can be bugged, and undersea fiber connections are especially vulnerable. This, in addition to all of the insecurities found in common consumer gear. There's probably a tidal wave of folks moving, but I agree: the move is n…

You can also encrypt the data before it gets to the server by a third-party who holds the key in your own country. (these services do exist btw) The question is then if those companies chose to give up the key to decrypt the information.

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#38

Post by devx »

dutchbrit wrote: post #24

You forgot the backdoors in your hardware. Yours faithfully, The United States of America

Maybe it's time EU, Latin America, and most of the Asian countries start banning US hardware, too - you know, just like US started banning Huawei, for the same reasons.

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#39

Post by toyg »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #10
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Nitpickers aside (yes, what they had they may still have or at least in digest form) this is a single instance of a tidal wave of people doing this. EU datacenters are doing quite well because of the NSA revelations. The economic impact of this could very well counteract any net plus the US had while they were able to spy at will. Likely it's not going to be the same parties that will end up footing the bill. The pra…

More to the point, this is a problem of layers. It's not just where you decide to host. Most every national government is probably involved in data sniffing to one degree or another, major hubs are/can be bugged, and undersea fiber connections are especially vulnerable. This, in addition to all of the insecurities found in common consumer gear. There's probably a tidal wave of folks moving, but I agree: the move is n…

The method is significant. I don't really have any issue with NSA trying to MITM, hack phones and tap cables: as long as my endpoints are safe and I'm using encryption between them, they have to work for it, so only real baddies will be seriously targeted.

What we cannot defend from is the liberal use of NSLs to subvert endpoints controlled by Google, Facebook etc, which make it way too easy for them to mass-dragnet, leading straight to LOVEINT abuses and the like. Moving away from these services should help in this regard.

This said, moving away from these services does take some work, which is why OP deserves lots of kudos.

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