181–190 of 201 posts
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I don’t remember the last time China threatened to invade Denmark? I do remember the last time the USA did. It was hours ago at a NATO summit.
Greenland invasion is just a joke no one take Trump seriously
Europe has reduced itself to a backwater. Surrounded by hostiles
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The default stance should be that nothing you do is private on the internet. If we're talking spying then no service in any country will be secure unless fully encrypted with audits. Any country with an intelligence agency can force companies in their jurisdiction to give them access to data otherwise.
Not sure what you are trying to say, except that it confirms my point: if a company in say, Germany, uses Microsoft and Google services for all their communications, then the US (!) can just get access to all their data. Now if that company was using services based in Germany, then only Germany could access that data, which is obviously much less of a sovereignty problem (Germany interfering with Germany's affair is…
In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands because that is where the infrastructure is. They also happen to be countries with world class intelligence agencies.
We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, no matter where it's hosted.
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Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so. And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats an…
> Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so. I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders. That's why things like Amazon's "EU Cloud" isn't really interesting to anyone in EU and…
I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open. I know there are some US entities who have public carnary style notices ("We have not been visited by a government agency, ..."), with the idea being that while they can compell you to not say a thing, they can't force you to say a thing. How well that would work in practise, I dunno, but it shows that some in the US anticipate the issue and at least signal to care about it.
But in the end I agree with you, the safer route for people in the EU is to not deal with this risk to begin with.
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The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world. International commerce and business and shared democratic norms are a fscking good things. We have lost the people who learned that the hard way, and they are being replaced with people who have never read a history book.
> The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world. Name one country with a large military force that done more good than bad with it? Seems to come with the territory that if you have a large military force, you somehow need to use it for something as otherwise it falls into disrepair, and that "something" tends to be trying to spread your culture on…
Philippines would disagree with this one.
A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives. And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equi…
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While I applaud the strides the EU is taking to decouple militarily, it's still a long ways away from replacing the security umbrella provided by the US military. The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure (although NATO provides a lot of interoperability between European militaries). It's no knock on Europe's efforts--it's just that the dependency on US military was almost a century in the makin…
> The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure That's... how EU works, intentionally? It's a decentralized union more or less, we're still independent countries with our own laws and what not, each country have their own command and control structure for their own military, on purpose.
Specifically, the problem of how those states can individually choose to plug their forces into a practiced system of military coordination.
Today, they can do that with NATO, but if they want an alternative, it doesn't exist and it will be difficult to build.
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I don’t remember the last time China threatened to invade Denmark? I do remember the last time the USA did. It was hours ago at a NATO summit.
Greenland invasion is just a joke no one take Trump seriously
You might not take their words as a true statement of fact, but the situation going on is still pretty damn serious!
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The main reason is that they are based locally, they charge in EUR, you can get the VAT back, and they are much more affordable than AWS.
AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year. Hetzner is just way cheaper and pricing is more predictable. I don’t need any advanced cloud offerings. And yes, being outside the US is another advantage rn.
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Not sure what you are trying to say, except that it confirms my point: if a company in say, Germany, uses Microsoft and Google services for all their communications, then the US (!) can just get access to all their data. Now if that company was using services based in Germany, then only Germany could access that data, which is obviously much less of a sovereignty problem (Germany interfering with Germany's affair is…
Sure for a German company in Germany that's perfectly reasonable, but we're not talking about each country in Europe having their own copy of AWS/Stripe/Search. In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands because that is where the infrastructure is. They also happen to be countries with world class intelligence agencies. We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the b…
We're not talking about having hyperscalers in each country, but I could totally imagine each country having infrastructure.
> In reality all the data will be in France/Germany/Netherlands
Having the choice between 3 European countries is already a lot better than giving all the data to the US. The US has been a lot more hostile to European countries than "the intersection of hostility from France/Germany/Netherlands".
> We need better services and protocols developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, no matter where it's hosted.
Sure, I agree with that. But one doesn't prevent the other. Typically it's not practical to run LLMs in a privacy-preserving manner, so it's a lot better (in terms of sovereignty) to run a server in a place you trust than in a hostile country.