Live data from Hacker News

Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

korte.co

141–150 of 239 posts

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not as simple as banking - people tend to want low-latency and high-speed connection which necessitate the data center to be in close proximity. Which basically means that founding a country with strong data protection laws somewhere in Antarctic won't get you many clients in Europe.

If the premise is that you want to host data for people in Europe who don't want it to be under the control of the US then Frankfurt is a lower latency place to be than Virginia anyway.

OP had a much stronger premise ("guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil") than what you described.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#142
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top. I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the cou…

Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff. Yes, this results in enshittification.

Ah yes, the art of making things shitty.

https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#143
post #55

We've known this since the Snowden leaks 13 years ago. In a couple of years there will probably be a president in the US that will be more palatable for the european political class and we'll all be able to go back to pretending this doesn't happen. After all the EU is too compromised energetically, militarily, industrially, burocratically and democratically to ever achieve independence. Talking about digital soverei…

I don’t think that trust is coming back with a simple president swap.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not as simple as banking - people tend to want low-latency and high-speed connection which necessitate the data center to be in close proximity. Which basically means that founding a country with strong data protection laws somewhere in Antarctic won't get you many clients in Europe.

that's a psyop from the cloud evangelism era. a few hundred milliseconds of latency make fuck all any difference for 95% of things, even voice/video calls.

That is just like, your opinion, man? I personally find it a very poor experience talking to someone over high latency connection when we tend to always start talking over each other.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#145
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top. I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the cou…

Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff. Yes, this results in enshittification.

I'd understand contracting a commercial provider to run the government infra, with extensive contractual obligations surrounding exactly how data is to be handled. What's wild to me is turning government bureaucrats loose to send and receive likely very sensitive information using the third party provider of their choice.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#146

In the meantime Belgian public sector will use Google Cloud, it seems: https://ittech-pulse.com/news/smals-partners-with-google-clo...

That's not the case. Smals will use it, that doesn't mean that the rest of the public sector has to follow.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#147
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore. And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies

But ultimately the Swiss decides what Switzerland does, and the population deciding they didn't want that, was the deciding factor. Been pressure on Switzerland about that for a long time, from many countries, and in fact still there is, as many still think they're not doing enough. Not everything in the world happens because of the US :)

You are naiive and/or stupid. And/or gaslighting. Most likely the latter since you have to sugarcoat your message with trailing emoji.

UBS tried to hold for as long as they could, and the choice the US given them is "pay a fine (accrues daily) or be cut from world financial system run by dollar".

UBS ultimately paid a 780 million fine. The rest of Swiss banks followed suit immediately.

Many things in the world happen, and most of the dumb bullshit that happens is imposed by US. This naiivete has to stop, the times have changed, and you, you spefically are part of the problem.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#148
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, seriously, what are you smoking? Some nutcases literally flew a plane into civillian buildings as a response to the works of these Washington minority.

I think you need to read more carefully, you are arguing against things you imagine I said. Write down what you believe you are objecting to, try to find that in the things I wrote.

>Americans themselves were used to seen as blameless, since those things were against what US stands for.

...

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#149
post #94

If a politically stable nation with a good international reputation were to guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil and run by its companies, that nation could become the Swiss bankers of data. Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens. It's a bit…

The more astonishing thing is that people regularly talk about this in the context of hosting providers when by far the more significant threat is mobile platforms. There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?

I have a sliding scale of devices I trust more or less (I trust nothing completely).

At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.

Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#150
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore. And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies

But ultimately the Swiss decides what Switzerland does, and the population deciding they didn't want that, was the deciding factor. Been pressure on Switzerland about that for a long time, from many countries, and in fact still there is, as many still think they're not doing enough. Not everything in the world happens because of the US :)

The US department requests that all foreign financial institutions share all their US clients details.

Wanna refuse? No problem. Of course you can. You're outside the US jurisdiction.

But every USD transaction you do is subject to, IIRC, 30% tax. Unless the US decides to block it altogether.

Post reply on HN